Ask HN: Best cheap hosting for a low traffic local business?

[tontoa4]

I've been building some websites lately for small local businesses that want an internet presence. For simplicity, I have the clients register the domain and pay for the hosting themselves. Where should I direct them to buy the hosting?

Thanks all. Nick

[mseebach]

Don't let clients anywhere near their own domains and hosting.

Before you know it, you're drenched in trouble, trying to get some hack-cheap-registrar to unlock domains or whatever, while the client is desperate because his e-mail doesn't work, or figuring out why the website broke, only to find out the boss's nephew tried to install a BT tracker on the site, and by the way, no, he doesn't have a backup, didn't you take care of that?

Get a small VPS at SliceHost and host the sites yourself. Forward their e-mail to GMail accounts, or setup apps for your domain. Charge $20 a month, paid a year in advance. One billing round a year, if it takes you more than half a morning, you're doing it wrong.

The only point of contact the client has is you, the only bill he gets is from you, and you're pretty soon pocketing a few $100 a month simply by not screwing up the server.

[compay → mseebach]

I've been down this road before and I agree with everything said here. Just to clarify something, I think mseebach meant that you should charge $20/month for yourself - and have the company pay for the Slicehost account. The smallest slice on SH is $20/mo so if you don't do that you won't be getting any compensation.

[mseebach → compay]

No, I meant charge $20 for everything from the client, and host them all on the same slice. A 256 vps easily hosts 10s of low traffic sites. Local business usually means mostly static, and on the scale of dozens of visits a week.

[compay → mseebach]

Ah, ok - right on.

[redrobot5050]

Make sure the client knows what they're doing with regards to a web presence: E.g. they can manage e-mail / hosting set ups. If they don't, they're likely to get burned, even with your advice.

I would advise getting a small VPS from Slicehost. Set it up so that it automatically backs up (they charge like $5/month to do machine replication, but having an always-ready-to-go daily backup of your client's machine should be a closer).

If you're going to go for old-school hobbyist shared-hosting, I'd suggest Myhosting.com or http://www.nobullshithosting.com/

I'd also advise you to stay away from Dreamhost.com. Their servers have terrible bandwidth, lose emails, and their TOS is ridiculously restrictive to the point where they can justify closing your account for any reason -- the primary one being that you're actually costing them more they're paying (e.g. using more than half the "promised" 500GBs of space their $9.99/month account gives you).

[mikeyur]

I tend to point any clients that want low cost hosting towards GeekStorage.com - they have a $35/yr plan. Another is A Small Orange, but I have had much more problems with ASO than I have with GeekStorage.

If you're looking for something 'beefier' - I'm currently with WebFaction.com - awesome guys, great if you need some cheap hosting for your Django/Rails apps (and don't want to pay for a VPS)

[RobGR]

All the cheap hosting places suck. Dealing with the customer and the non-responsive $5 / mo hosting place takes more time and effort than just hosting it yourself.

If they are truly low traffic, just host them yourself on a business class connection. You can pack a lot of low traffic websites on one machine. Graphics will load slowly unless you pay for more bandwidth, and you have to do your own backups, of course. Have your customers buy the domain themselves, but then have them log into godaddy or whoever they used and do the setup yourself.

Should the business relationship end, they control the domain and can just point it somewhere else, and you can mail their backup to them on a CD, and thus not be accused of holding anything hostage.

[pg]

Why not Weebly?

[tontoa4 → pg]

Forgot about weebly, I've been on the site before but didn't think about it because I associated it amateur sites. Can you paste your own html?

[chris → tontoa4]

We currently have the ability to upload your own theme and customize existing themes, in development. Shoot me an email, chris (at) weebly.com, and I'll give you access. Otherwise, this feature should be live early next week =)

[oldgregg → tontoa4]

Weebly is a great concept, but right now they only have a small selection of relatively bland templates... Until they open it up to outside custom templates (or find a way to convert wordpress templates!) it's a hard sell.

[silvestrov]

Whoever you choose, make sure you always have an up-to-date local backup of everything on the site. Cheap webhosting is prone to loosing customer files when something goes wrong.

[theklub]

I use Apisnetworks.com. You can add as many domains as you want to one account. Servers are fast and I haven't had any problems with them.

[pclark]

A Small Orange are great :)