VPs or Cloud hosting & who?

[Anwweb]

Dear Techie’s & Web Guru’s

I need some advice and hoped this would be a good place to start, hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Sorry for the long post, but really want to nail this one time and not have to rebuild it again till I am in a much better financial / time position.

Long story short I will need to host maybe 20 small 5 page ish general business sites and a few slightly bigger ones (maybe 20 pages with an online shop / blog) .

Of these site, hopefully the smaller ones will have about 10000 or 15000 view per month. So I need the best way to do this as I’ve tried a few reseller programs in the past and they are **** poor without even having any real traffic and false promises of subscriptions that allow unlimited domains!

I can’t at present afford a dedicated server nor have the time to dedicate to running it, so it seems my option is VPS or cloud hosting (either with whm / cpanel). Which way would you guys go, they work out kind of the same price and the scalability.

One thing that’s interesting at the moment with the exchange rate, is the deals back home in the UK maybe better value / on par with the US hosts I was originally thinking off, so interested in any recommendations (except go daddy, green geeks or hostgator).

My second dilemma is that some customers may want to access their sites, to make edits (simple stuff like change / add photo’s, edit text) so I figure the easiest why to do this would be wordpress multisite with divi / vc / some friendlyish backend? Any other thoughts, I really haven’t got time to learn and build the majority of stuff in bootstrap and html, although this what I’d like to do where ever I can and I know the customer is unlikely to want or hardly change anything ever.

[TheGAME1264]

You don't want HostGator? Oh, come on. Everyone loves The Gator.

It's not what I'd use in your situation. lt's who I'd use in your situation. DISCLAIMER: I haven't used this company's VPSes in any capacity. I have only used their shared hosting and I presently use a dedicated box with them personally.

https://www.sectorlink.com/cloudservers.php

Why do I recommend them? Because there isn't a host on the planet that can even touch them for what I do. As you'll probably see from my posts on here, there's a thoroughly unsubstantiated rumo(u)r that I am an intelligent human being and that I know what I'm doing when it pertains to code. Because I've been able to keep up the charade for over 14 years, I've pretty much beaten Sectorlink's servers like a redheaded stepchild and put it through its paces. The hardware has almost never failed (the last time anything failed was a hard drive in 2009). So the uptime is there. More importantly, the support is the best in the business hands down. It isn't even close. When you talk to them and you use them, you'll understand why. Smart, smart people. When you ask them a question, they don't cram stock answers down your throat. The only time you'll get a stock answer is when it fits the question (which almost never happens with me). They're also the only company that solved a support issue of mine via email in 60 seconds (I actually timed it).

There are two questions that I have with your post:

1) Why so many sites? Are they for you or for various businesses/clients? One makes sense; the other may not.
2) What is your basis for traffic estimation? Is it based on what they get now?

[Anwweb]

Hi,

Thanks will check them out, In answer to your questions,

1) Yes they will be for different customers, mainly businesses that have no or an older unfriendly mobile site that that they wish to replace / update. I don't expect 50% of the sites to receive a lot of traffic, just an online presence as such.The clients businesses are all different.

2) Yes, from the page view counter software they had installed, I took the time the site has been up and divided it. Not ideal, but it's the only info we have access to. As the current site is registered as subdoamin of a parent site, so she's wanting move away from this now and have her own, and because of this I can not setup search console to monitor the site for true traffic.

[TheGAME1264]

Okay, cool. 1) was what I was hoping you'd say. The page counter software at least means they're established sites and not "new guy with Really Good Idea overestimating traffic."

[Anwweb]

Yeah from what I have, I ca't imagine some of the sites will get 100 views a month, without proper SEO and Paid adword campaigns. Just a point of ref, a couple other maybe 2000 views a month from paid advertising. Hopefully a successful blog (1 day....lol ) and some niche market sites that will hopefully generate some decent views, based on their current and competitors monthly.

So the above leads me to the problems of how do I control and run all this as easy possible. I have limited funds, so except for free trails, hence asking for advice here.

Can I throw it out there, numerous I.P's

3) With my vps / clouhosting, I noticed I can have more than one I.P. Am I over thinking from what I've found, that -

It would benefit me to have say 3, one for the WP customers sites, 1 for my own sites, 1 for a separate for the niche side.

Does the web still know it's actually coming from the same vps. Does it matter?

4) Is it best I link my brand from their site to mine, as in adding my link in at the bottom of the page, like most web designers, or doing it the other way as testimonials for me as such. Ultimately, I'm more interested in helping the customers sites being successful, than my own marketing. (especially as goggle mobile has the search a word feature now, so they can search the name not the link if their interested in who designed it).

[TheGAME1264]

3) You generally won't get more than one unless you can legitimately justify it. Even if you can, you may not get it.

The IP Address Shortage Problem Has Arrived. And it got here faster than expected.

Unless someone's doing something like using an SSL on a server that requires SSL on its own IP (e.g. Windows Server 2008 and prior), that'll be a tough sell.

The web "may or may not know", and it really doesn't matter as long as no one's doing anything untoward or spammy...or you're not in say an EIG host IP block.

4) Designer credit hyperlinks are never a good idea. Simple logic: you were paid to do a job. You're not being paid to advertise on someone's site. That link can only hurt the customer; it cannot help the customer. The customer can only lose traffic and cannot gain it back.

People have been arguing with me about this for fourteen years, and no one has come up with a rational counterargument whereby it benefits the customer. There is no argument for this.

Testimonials are meaningless to me. Anyone can "write" them, and anyone can claim they had testimonials written for them. What makes sense is a legitimate statement from a client with verifiable proof that the client made it. "Bob builted me da bestest site on teh Intarwebz -- John, Business Owner" isn't going to cut it.

[crabby12]

This really depends on the nature of the site that you’re hosting.

Dedicated server hosting has always been popular amongst e-commerce companies, web development agencies and other, similar businesses where it’s vital for them to have total control over the server. With dedicated hosting, bandwidth and storage space are cheap and there’s room to grow, but the resources that you have available to you are finite and you’ll pay the same price no matter how much of the server you’re using.

Cloud hosting is often cheaper, at least to begin with, because you pay for what you use. It’s also more resilient to downtime and it allows users to scale their resources up and down as needed, so if there’s a sudden spike of traffic then it won’t take the site down. However, cloud hosting can quickly become more expensive than using a dedicated server as you continue to add resources, and it doesn’t always have the same high level of performance. Still, it’s a popular choice for all sorts of companies, from small startups to large internationals.

One important thing to remember is that the “cloud” in “cloud hosting” refers to the architecture, rather than the actual type of hosting. It’s still a VPS because cloud servers are virtual, private and a server, so it can help to think of cloud hosting as a VPS on steroids.