- my favorite pokemon of that type: GARCHOMP

- my second favorite pokemon of that type: Dialga

- the cutest pokemon of that type: Axew

- least favorite pokemon of that type: Shelgon

Now that’s a question I can get my teeth into, thankyou!

If anyone is reading this and has a comment, correction or addition then please do let me know.

Ok, so there are a few things to consider and weigh up before you pick a hosting provider. It’s ok to not know for sure until your site has gone through some testing on VMs or the cloud and you’ve gotten some feedback:

How ‘heavy’ is your site?

How much traffic do you expect to get in the first few months?

Can you handle securing and maintaining a server yourself in addition to developing it?

What do you want the site to do in case of a disaster?

For how heavy it is, consider how much processing you’re doing in PHP, how many and how large the images are and how much database crunching you’re doing and how optimised your database structure is. Well optimised database queries and scheduled updates rather than realtime on-page-load ones can save you a lot here. You can also run it locally on a virtual machine to get an idea of what kind of spec it starts to struggle on.

For traffic, consider both unique users and their individual impressions. Multiply that by how heavy it is and you’ll get an idea of how much brawn your server(s) will need.

Security is boring until it very suddenly isn’t and then hoo boy, it’s the ride of your life.Keeping servers up to date without breaking functionality is a god damn chore. PHP 5.4 has a major unpatched issue? Well PHP 5.6 does x differently so now the site’s broke. PHP-fpm is fast and great but now things that take a while are timing out, better re-read the manual and tweak that config file. Setting up an SSL certificate is tedious, but if you let it expire or do it wrong then the site may as well be down and people (including you) start screaming. (I have a love-hate relationship with being a sysadmin, can you tell?)

Disasters suck. Scriptkiddies trying to use your box to mine dogecoins with the latest day0 leet apache exploit sucks. Dropping the live database will send you into shock. So, how do you want to handle downtime and disaster? You can do anything from just letting it fail to serving a page from a tiny separate server with a “whoops” message while you restore backups to having multiple interconnected redundant systems sharing the load, storing files and hosting the database. Running more servers than you “need to” costs money but having no backups or plan will ruin your week.

Right, so on to the meat of it. Your choices boil down to three options:

Virtual Private Server

Dedicated

Cloud

VPSs used to be a real metal server but a lot of companies are offering cloud VPS these days. What the name means is it’s “virtually private”, you actually share a server with dozens or hundreds of other people’s sites. You each have your own users on that server and none of you have direct access to each others files or databases, but they’re there.

Pros:

Easy

Cheap

The security and maintenance are managed by someone else

Most cloud VPSs offer DDOS protection these days

Cons:

You’ll never have root

If someone elses site is hammering the CPU, processor or storage your site will have issues

You’re locked in to the software versions they offer and at the whims of their update schedule.

Configuring apache can be a real pain in the arse

If you are the one hammering the server, expect the offending process to get killed without warning. That was your nightly database calculations? Tough luck my friend, three more of those and we switch off your site.

Dedicated servers

Pros:

Anything from an absolute goddamn workhorse that will not stop to the tiniest raspberry pi

Hardware guarantees and warranties out the wazoo

You have a real server, in a datacentre

Can be managed or not managed, up to you

Want to add more ram, drives, network cards or a GPU? Sure thing. Attach a USB dongle? Go ahead, just post it to us. Want to come in and stroke it lovingly? Arrange it with them, wear something warm, sign this, fingerprint here, follow Dennis and wave at the cameras as you go. Treat it like the cave of wonders, only touch your lamp and it’s all good.

Cons:

Expensive as fuck in the short term.

Want to add another server to your cluster? Sorry man Dell don’t sell that one anymore, also it’s $2000 for the new model and $500 to configure it

Hardware failure

Human error (I once lost a site because someone unplugged the wrong cable, a guy I worked with lost an entire datacentre because someone snapped under stress and went at it with a fucking AXE)

Figuring out what kind of physical setup is really best for you

Phonecalls, everything is phonecalls

Cloud

Pros:

It’s literal magic

So cheap. Oh my god.

Cloud servers charge hourly (in the order of pennies or less) for what you use, so if you want to scale things back that’s an instant saving.

Managed or not, up to you

It’s like a dedicated machine being stored on a VPS (this is a bad analogy but it works), with added protection against CPU and memory hogs ruining your day. Noisy neighbour or slow file access times? Ask to get moved to a new hypervisor.

Change CPU, storage and memory size whenever you like. Hell most of them have an API that lets you write your own tools to do it with a single click or even automatically.

Clone the whole machine to a file. Boom, five new servers running an identical config on identical hardware. Makes setting up a test environment or recovering from a disaster super easy. These aren’t backups but in an emergency they’re incredible.

Want one of those servers in the US and one in Singapore? Done. Identical.

Cons:

Terminology is clear as mud. Ever since the sales reps and boardrooms heard of “the cloud” this shit has gotten out of hand. No Simon the usb harddrive under your desk is not a cloud.

Amazon uses their own unique terminology. Fucking amazon. (good service, just make sure you’re getting what you need/expect)

That clone you wanted restored is in a queue. They’re not telling you where in the queue. It’s been four hours.

Microtransactions, everything more than the basics has a small extra cost, possibly a different cost depending on the region it’s hosted in. 

Some providers limit you to one public IPv4 per machine unless you’re adding multiple SSL or running a virtual router. Internal IPs are usually fine because you’re on a virtual network.

You’re on a virtual network, but it might not be a private one. This was a big security issue recently and is still something to consider if you want to handle transactions. If you’re not, or if you use SSL for all communications then it’s less of an issue.

You can still migrate from one to another, VPS to cloud and over to dedi, if you change your mind later. It can be a hassle, but it’s entirely possible and just a day or so’s work after the files have copied. You could even run the main site on a dedicated machine and use a cheap cloud box for semi-public testing while you have a virtual machine for development. As long as you keep the software and config the same, you’ll have few surprises when you deploy.

So, to answer your question: The one that fits.

I’d love to recommend ServerLove (run by Melbourne who are owned by IOmart.) who I use, but they’re a UK only datacentre. I love them to bits though. Easy to use, no problems and I never had to call a soul.

Rackspace provide all these server types, have internationally located engineers and datacentres and have a pretty good web portal. They only fucked up badly twice in four years, which is pretty good going. 

Amazon, if you can translate their jargon, or use someone to manage it for you (both Rackspace and IOmart offer this), are supposed to be great.

Godaddy are absolute scum. Ignore their lies and their apparently low prices.

Whoever you go for, check out the SLA (Service Level Agreement). You should be getting something like 99.9% uptime, guaranteed replies within a few hours to any issues you submit (not guaranteed to be useful, just a reply) an escalation process for getting really bad issues sorted out by someone who knows their stuff and an account manager (Named account managers cost extra so plain is fine). SLAs are serious business and you hold most of the power. Mention to a manager if the SLA is breached and they’ll take it seriously, to the chagrin of the engineers.

ah shame about the commentators, cool to see you play though!

I mean it wasn’t malicious. I just didn’t take the time to let them know beforehand, Squid’s acquainted with me but doesn’t know me too well on a personal level (like he said he never ended up asking for my name or tag lol). I actually really liked what he had to say during the set. The misgendering was lame but it wasn’t like a fault on their end

*cop sirens*

“got a haircut and some cool stuff today BB) they/them”

THAT'S ALL GREAT STUFF AND YOU LOOKIN RAD AS FUCK TODAY

THANK YOU BB)

phoukaenvy replied to your photoset

“got a haircut and some cool stuff today BB) they/them”

aaaaaaaaaaaaaa omg you are so cute <3 also sweet loot

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah (/w\)

weereebee replied to your photoset

“got a haircut and some cool stuff today BB) they/them”

nice!!! also 3 wolf moon omg.....