Which mail and web hosting to choose

The choice of web hosting is often taken for granted, but when you start to hit the limits, a problem arises. <br>> Although I mostly move around on servers, but on rare occasions I consider from whom I should choose web and mail hosting, even I ask myself a difficult question: Which one is the best? In order to choose a good hosting you need to know a little bit about the technology and think about what you need.

I have encountered various hosting sites starting with free hosting sites like wz.cz and sweb. Gradually as the demands increased, so did the possibilities and quality of the services offered. Some hosts often disappeared as the train ran out of steam and new ones continuously re-emerged.

Hostings

Generally speaking, there are several services under the name of web hosting. These are:

• Web hosting
• Mail hosting
• DNS management

For mail hosting it is nowadays customary to have a web interface. The management of DNS records is also usually accessible via a web interface. Data on web hosting is usually uploaded using the FTP protocol.

In 2010-2014, wedos was very popular. It had a good web interface for the time, with the ability to edit where and even set DNS records at will. Plus it offered an interesting wedos disk service.

Another interesting offer is Savana, which runs web hosting on dedicated VPS and allows minor configuration adjustments . In addition, it also allows SSH access.

One company that has been somewhat reborn is WorldHosting, which now offers web hosting on dedicated VPS after upgrading the services offered.

However, there are many more companies that offer web hosting, after all, it is the most common service...

Requirements

The standard tools in the web application industry are PHP and MySQL databases. All paid hosting services meet this requirement. Various extensions to PHP (libraries) are also needed, but even that is now standard.

A much narrower choice is available to those who use something other than the above mentioned mainstream technologies for their projects. Those who develop web applications in Java or Python don't have much choice when it comes to hosting. Often they have to settle for what is available or they prefer to handle the hosting themselves. This also makes PHP and MySQL the most widely used among developers and, in retrospect, the most commonly requested and therefore offered service ...
More complex projects for example and enterprise solutions are then often solved individually in Jave EE or Python.

Performance

Although advertisements often entice with offers of unlimited and fastest hosting, this is usually not the case. Even hosting with a SSD drive is no guarantee of great performance. You need to remember that all the cheaper hosting is shared, and that there can be so many sites running in parallel for little cost, both the web server and the database are throttled. The server configuration is therefore crucial and rarely does the customer get to see more detailed information, fortunately this is gradually changing.
An optimally configured server can help performance and conversely a poorly configured one can kill an application. In the case of Apache and PHP, you'll know early on, but in the case of a database, sometimes it can take time. In one case, I even encountered the evaluation of a challenging SQL query dying completely...
However, the specific bottlenecks of configuration parameters must be found out by the developer himself by analyzing and testing the real application.

You can verify the performance of an application in combination with hosting by stress testing a web application.

Option

For a small website, it more or less doesn't matter which company a layman gets web hosting from. In the long run and especially if the site has more than minimal requirements and the developer likes to develop efficiently and the project is to be pushed further, a dedicated server is often a good choice, even a virtual one is sufficient.

ISPconfig

Sample web interface for managing your own server with web and mail hosting.

Modern Web Hosting

If you are choosing a web host, it is good to know what a good web host should meet. If you have a new modern application, it will definitely require a good modern web hosting. That's why I made this video on what a good web/mail hosting should meet in 2019.

Typically a server is a LAMP

• LAMP is Linux Apache Mysql PHP. today often instead of a web server is Apache Nginx and instead of Mysql its fork MariaDB
• HTTPS Let's Encrypt
• modules for PHP, PHP settings
• access to FTP hosting no longer today but rather SFTP or FTPS
• PHPmyadmin for DB management or admin
• Security:
  • firewall
  • log checking
  • system integrity check - if the server has been attacked and modified by a program
• backup
• installing updates
• mail POP3 no longer IMAP is better + sieve, DKIM and SPF settings

Anyone who wants help with the server or to install and configure it well and have it work free should get in touch. For my own server I can recommend the administration interface ISP Config

PHP version 5.6 support ended in January 2019 . Support information for each PHP version.

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VPS hosting

Companies that offer virtual private servers (VPS) and web hosting:

• Your hosting
• Wedos

Links

SQL Database: PostgreSQL
Ebook: Linux Server Administrator Notes