Hosting Suggestions For a WordPress Site + Membership
 

Heya -

I found this forum while researching hosting solutions as I'm planning to switch providers. Thanks for the awesome write-ups and honest assessments, they are pretty hard to come by :-)

If possible I would love some pointers, since my setup is slightly different than a standard WordPress blog.

I'm currently hosted on whgeeks (shared) - and I'm pretty satisfied overall, but since I'm based in the Netherlands (and 90% of my visitors are as well) and they only have a US datacenter – I've noticed it's just not optimal.

My site currently gets around 1000 unique visits a month (averaging 3 pages per session). I'm planning on growing it though, as I haven't really worked on it for a good few months.

I suppose I have around 50 posts and pages currently, and I'll be adding some landing pages (for some paid traffic tests) and around 2 content posts (either text, youtube video or a podcast - hosted off site) a week.

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The main thing is I'm adding a membership site (separate installation on a subdomain is the idea) running a combination of Digital Access Pass, WooCommerce (with a few extensions) and BBpress. (This is pretty much the only combination of solutions that can provide the functionality and work together in terms of access and subscription payments for the NL)

I don't expect it to gain a lot of traction instantly, but it will probably gain some members steadily through the year – and I want it to run smoothly.

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I was looking at cloudways.com, as their proposition really appealed to me (managed, super easy scaling and "optimized performance"). But I couldn't find a lot of data on them.

I know my way around WordPress and have used it for years. But I'm no hosting expert and not capable of running a VPS myself (nor do I want to).

I guess a good shared host will probably still suffice for a while – as long as upgrading / scaling is easy (since I don't want to keep switching every time).

As for budget, i'd like to start lower (<$20) and ramp it up – rather than pay a lot upfront.

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Do you still recommend the same hosts for a setup like this? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers!

You're correct -- a U.S. location for an EU site is not ideal. For your needs, anything in Amsterdam or London is best.

DAP and bbPress can be resource hogs. So that's your main worry.

I don't think a VPS is needed here. Should the day come that a VPS is required, then EuroVPS is what I'd use.

What you need is a host with some experience at DAP/bbPress/Woo, that understands its resource needs, with better-than-average plans.

Realize that "cloud" hosting is still just shared, VPS or dedicated -- just with more computers involved. It's not necessarily better, faster, etc. In fact, depending on the cloud infrastructure, it can actually be worse. Anything OnApp-based, for example, is pretty bad.

Cloudways is not a cloud host. They appear to use NON-CLOUD Digital Ocean, and Amazon S3. While S3 is a true cloud, it's not standard hosting. They also have some ethical issues from reading around WOT and other places. I'd avoid that mess for sure.

Is $20 your max budget monthly? If so, I may have a perfect solution for you. :)

Thanks for the fast reply!

I figured that cloudways wasn't a real "cloud" host from reading some of your other posts. Did some test on a trial account - already ran in some trouble with a fresh WP install, so i'm happy to avoid it ;p

Yeah $20/month max is what I'm thinking for now (and I'd be happy to spend more when I have some more traction and getting a return), so by all means, I'd love to hear your solution :)

I've PM'd you about something that's not yet public knowledge. :)