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Time and time again I see these articles, and time and time again, people just don't listen. If you are technically inclined enough to run a website, take a da

Time and time again I see these articles, and time and time again, people just don't listen. If you are technically inclined enough to run a website, take a day (I promise that's how long it will take) to learn to configure a Linode instance (they have extensive scripts that will do most everything for you). I know you think your time is more valuable, but learning how to configure a simple LAMP Ubuntu server will pay dividends in the future. You can host all of your sites on there for $20 a month, they're absolutely great to work with, and you won't be dealing with an oversold shared server. And how can you take this article seriously when it's plastered with ads for Hostgator?

kijin 15y ago
I'd much rather have these people stay with cheap shared hosting. There are too many poorly secured and poorly optimized VPSs "managed" by people who think they know how to run a server because they copied and pasted some Ubuntu tutorials. Sooner or later, they cause their Linodes to thrash, their sites gets exploited, or they botch up an upgrade and their sites are down anyway. Some people will learn from these experiences and become better sysadmins. But most people who just want to run a WordPress blog with cutesy plugins are not interested in troubleshooting an unmanaged VPS. Someone who can't be bothered to enable error logs in php.ini to see what's causing all the 500 errors isn't the kind of person who will learn from a VPS malfunction. They'll just bash their host for being unmanaged, move to another host, wash, rinse, repeat. HostGator is about as good as "cheap" shared hosts can get, not only because they're more competent than the majority of shared hosts, but also because they seem to be willing to deal with these kinds of customers. They understand that their typical customer is utterly uninterested in troubleshooting any issue whatsoever. (GoDaddy caters to the same clientele, but they're far less competent and a lot more shady.) If the same customer went with NearlyFreeSpeech.net, they'd just end up writing another blog post ranting about how their host charges money for support tickets and expects the customer to participate in the troubleshooting process. How dare the host ask the customer to chmod a file!? NearlyFreeSpeech and Linode are too good for these folks.

kijin 15y ago

I'd much rather have these people stay with cheap shared hosting. There are too many poorly secured and poorly optimized VPSs "managed" by people who think they know how to run a server because they copied and pasted some Ubuntu tutorials. Sooner or later, they cause their Linodes to thrash, their sites gets exploited, or they botch up an upgrade and their sites are down anyway. Some people will learn from these experiences and become better sysadmins. But most people who just want to run a WordPress blog with cutesy plugins are not interested in troubleshooting an unmanaged VPS. Someone who can't be bothered to enable error logs in php.ini to see what's causing all the 500 errors isn't the kind of person who will learn from a VPS malfunction. They'll just bash their host for being unmanaged, move to another host, wash, rinse, repeat. HostGator is about as good as "cheap" shared hosts can get, not only because they're more competent than the majority of shared hosts, but also because they seem to be willing to deal with these kinds of customers. They understand that their typical customer is utterly uninterested in troubleshooting any issue whatsoever. (GoDaddy caters to the same clientele, but they're far less competent and a lot more shady.) If the same customer went with NearlyFreeSpeech.net, they'd just end up writing another blog post ranting about how their host charges money for support tickets and expects the customer to participate in the troubleshooting process. How dare the host ask the customer to chmod a file!? NearlyFreeSpeech and Linode are too good for these folks.