Since its inception in 2015 I have hosted this site at Hostinger. I opted for this managed hosting service back in the days when I was unfamiliar with managing my own Linux server. I started with a free trial hosting service but within a week it run out of the necessary CPU credits to run a WordPress instance, and that was when I signed a 3-year contract for a basic paid hosting plan. Hostinger HK was still in its infancy then and the plan was of decent value.
Over the years I have been offered several ‘free’ upgrades every time the contract requires renewal, plans with more resources at the same renewal price. These upgrades caused price hikes in the subsequent years as they would have said in some small print hidden behind inconspicuous links and today my plan has grown to include resources way exceeding the site’s requirements at a huge renewal price tag. Furthermore, problems of slow speed and intermittent uptime with the Hostinger server in Singapore persisted through these upgrades and every other week I would receive several warning emails from monitoring services about my server being unresponsive. With my last plan with Hostinger expiring at some point next year I have decided it’s the time to move on.
I now know the basics of servers and networking such that a managed hosting plan for the inexperienced is no longer appealing. I have, thus, opted for renting a virtual machine and, this time, from a reputable large provider. I have used some Microsoft Azure student credits before and decided to stick with them.
This site is now hosted in Azure west Europe in a standard B1ms virtual machine. This is the minimum amount of resources required to run the site with RAM to spare (at 2 GB), which I determined by experimenting with smaller configurations. It is extremely useful that Azure allows you to grow and shrink the amount of resources allocated to your virtual machine at the cost of a reboot. This has proven to be of great help when I migrated this site, to do which it was necessary to load the site’s close to 2 GB’s data files into memory. The B1ms, which is sufficient for running the site, does not have enough RAM for this and I was able to upgrade it to an 8 GB RAM instance for 30 minutes or so to allow me to complete the operation, and the cost of this ‘manual burst’ is only a few pence.
A 66% discount was possible on the virtual machine if I signed up to a 3-year reservation rather than paying by the hour, which is good value for web hosting where the server needs to be constantly online. Resources such as a public IP and managed storage are still paid by usage.
Since the migration, access from the UK has seen a tremendous speed boost. Managing the site and uploading photos for the gallery is now much easier and this should mean more updates and frequent new contents. I can now also access the server via ssh and have sudo privileges to configure features such as an SSL certificate. Access of this kind is not normally possible with a managed hosting service and they usually charge for installing an SSL certificate for you. I remember paying some money to Hostinger to have an SSL installed, and only very recently did I find out the domain name on the certificate is not even mine.
I am still observing the monthly average cost but I am confident it will be less than if I was to stay with Hostinger.
If this new hosting solution degraded your experience using this site, I’d be curious to know about it. Write to me at [email protected].