My provider is increasing their pricing to $8.50 a month. Although not outrageous, I’m getting tired of increases. Can you guys let me know if you recommend any specific provider that runs well with WD and the Saratoga templates cheaper. I’m using mdd hosting which have been rock solid so questioning me changing anything if all are around the same price for quality. I miss erice
Thanks
John
You might find that many hosting companies are putting up prices or have already done so. The recent very significant increases in energy costs means it costs them a lot more to power the servers and provide the necessary room cooling to keep everything running. The costs for my physical servers in a big hosting facility are going up in January for that reason.
I’m not sure if they will suit your requirements by Hetzner Cloud servers are relatively cheap. I’ve just run one up for the specific task of providing a cluster quorum vote server and it’s got 1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 20GB Disk, 20TB/month bandwidth (only traffic out is measured), 1 IPv4 address and that’s 4.55 Euros per month. There are other options, e.g. an extra vCPU, more RAM, more disk for more money so you can choose what you like. This is a server of your own so they shouldn’t really complain about FTP usage, etc…all you might find is that your own performance might suffer if you push it too hard. You can rescale the server to add vCPU/RAM/disk if you need to. Also with it being your own (virtual) server you’re not worrying about security issues from other users on the same server. Depending on your skills, the downside is that it’s a ‘bare’ Linux server with no fancy front end so you need to manage it yourself and configure whatever you need…but that’s a fun challenge!
I’ve found Hetzner very reliable - I’ve been with them since 2013 so they must be doing something right!
I, too, have 3 Vserver instances with Hetzner (ionos.com) that run all the sites I manage. Two are with Plesk/CentOS and one bare Ubuntu 20.04LTS . It costs an extra $5/mo for the Plesk on each of the two Plesk/CentOS servers. Nothing extra on the Ubuntu.
Thanks for the info guys. I switched to their web hosting plan for 2.09 euros a month which is unbelievable. With the conversion it’s $2.20 lol. I actually think this is cheaper than the old erice days lol. Since hosted in Germany my ping times range from 100-200 but seriously for a weather website I don’t see how you can go wrong with this plan. All my Saratoga templates are running perfectly.
Thanks again.
I didn’t know they offered web hosting so that’s useful to know.
Just looked at the website and found this…
===============================
and it recently added a new location in Ashburn, Virginia, USA.
========================
Thanks
Steve
Just an update on Hetzner as my host provider. They have been rock solid for over a year now. Not one issue. It’s hosted in Germany but has been a non-issue for me here in the USA. For basically less than $2 a month not sure why anyone would look elsewhere :). FYI I’m running WD and the Saratoga templates, grlevel3 radar and a webcam that uploads every 5 minutes. It’s handling the heavy ftp needs without issue. I get roughly 400 hits a day.
1 Like
jbonzey, could you explain exactly how you transferred over your website from one server/howt to another? With HostPapa, I can download my entire website. What exactly would I do with it once downloaded? Can you explain the steps with Hetzner? I may very well go with them.
There are a few things you will need to do and you will stumble along the way but in the end it’s not that bad. First thing you need to do before cancelling anything is download your entire site back to your pc so you can push it to Hetzner at the end of all this.
Second thing is I would recommend going to a 3rd party dns registrar like godaddy.com for domain name registration. This will allow you to easily transfer to another hosting company in the future should Hetzner start playing games. I never have dns registration at the actual hosting company for that reason -Even though it’s free most times. If you go with godaddy, to change to a new host provider in the future it is a few mouse clicks. There are some cheaper alternatives but I’ve used godaddy for years and dont want to deal with changing at this point over 5 bucks lol.
I found the link below to cancel your service. I believe godaddy will need an authorization code from hostpapa for the transfer to them. One of the questions within the link below is if you wish to transfer to another provider. This likely will get you the authorization epp code needed. Get an authorization (also known as an EPP code or transfer key) from your current registrar. This code is needed by godaddy. The code stops unauthorized transfers etc.
So the steps are:
- Backup your current entire website to your local pc
- Cancel your service with hostpapa and get the authorization code mentioned above.
- Transfer your domain name over to godaddy. https://www.godaddy.com/domains/domain-transfer
- Open an account with Hetzner webhosting for their level one currently at 2.09 euros a month. There is a one time setup fee of like 9 bucks or something but whatever.
- Once all this is done in this order you will simply point your godaddy domain dns over to Hetzner.
- Push your saved website to Hetzner.
- If using weather display you will likely need to change the login credentials to the ones Hetzner gave you.
I know this all seems a bit much but we can help you through it. We have all had to do this at some point :). But again you may stumble along the way but in the end you will be paying $2 a month and won’t need to go through all this in the future if a change is necessary.
** if anyone sees a misstep with the above please comment. I’m going off memory but I’m pretty sure this is accurate.
I’ve done this numerous times myself and it looks reasonable to me.
I don’t know how much control you have over your DNS, but if you can set up a secondary ‘A’ record pointing to your Hetzner server IP address then you can start to test your site works before you move your ‘full’ site DNS across. For example create www2.mydomain.com pointing to Hetzner, then upload your site to Hetzner and then see if you can access your site using that hostname. Your site might not work perfectly because if you’ve got references to www.mydomain.com in any of the URLs on your pages they will point back to the old site. However, as a basic check that you’ll probably have a working Hetzner site it’s worth doing this if possible.
One other thing to bear in mind is TTL (Time To Live) settings for DNS. Depending on how HostPapa have them set it could take a day or two, or even longer, before the DNS system starts giving out your new IP address after you make the change. If you’re able to, reduce the DNS TTL for your domain to something very low, e.g. 180s. That change will take the current TTL time (maybe a day or two) to become active, but once 180s is active when you come to make the final IP address change it will happen within 3 minutes. Low DNS TTLs can make lookups a bit slower but in reality for the kind of sites that we’re running you’ll never notice the difference.
1 Like
I agree with what you are saying!!! When I went to godaddy for the dns registrar it propagated quite quickly once I put in the Hetzner pointers. It was roughly a year ago so i can’t remember if I was I able to push the website to verify the site was reasonably working before I pointed godaddy to it. For the $2 a month I’m thinking I flash cut it and just went with it :). It’s a weather website so I could deal with some downtime. Reality is it wasn’t down for very long (few hours or less) as I made sure dns was set on my router to go to google at 8.8.8.8 for my browser. Godaddy must update Google quickly or something. I do remember it took my cell phone a while longer to see it updated. You know a lot more than me on all this for sure as I kind of just winged it 
Propagation depends on the original DNS provider settings rather than the new GoDaddy settings until the domain has migrated to GoDaddy.
So you need to get the TTL settings for the current DNS provider and GoDaddy set low until the migration is complete.
Wow. Thanks for all the info. I already have my domain registered with GoDaddy (www.goosebayweather.com). It all looks a bit complicated but I’ll have to get the courage up to tackle it. HostPapa runs out on Jan. 16. So, when downloading my entire site to my local PC, is there anything I actually upload to Hetzner or adjusting the settings in Weather Display does it all?
I think Godaddy have a default TTL of 1 hour, so if you change the DNS records the new records will be visible to everyone within an hour.
You’d need to upload the files for your site to the Hetzner server. If you download all files from the web server home directory on HostPapa and then upload the same set of files to the home directory on Hetzner that should work.
For WD, you’ll almost certainly need to change the upload config to suit the Hetzner server.
I suppose another option I have is to create my own server. I’m connected to my Sinology DS916+ with 8TB of storage but it might not be worth the headache to just save $5 a month. When downloading my website and uploading it to a new host, is there any issue with doing it over a span of several days or is it recommended to do it simultaneously? I’m not too worried about being “down” for a couple of days.