Need Help Website Hosting: Help For Future?

[Pieter Boelen]

Ahoy there @Bartolomeu o Portugues, @Levis and @DH27,

I just updated all the billing information for our HostGator server to my own details.
In so doing, I saw this:

Hosting Package: Shared
Hosting Plan: Baby
Package ID: ******
Renewal Date: 2021-12-28
Billing Status: active
Price: $143.40

As I have NO CLUE what I am getting into here, I had the following chat with the HostGator support staff:

PB: What do "shared" and "baby" refer to?

HG: Shared Baby is a hosting package that we have with us. We do have many hosting plans and this is one of them.

PB: Reason I ask: normally the website works fine. But we have been featured on "PC Gamer" twice and that is SO popular that immediately right after, the servers die down for about a week.

Since we intend to build a larger presence in the future, it would be nice if we could avoid that. After all, it doesn't help if interest finally spikes and then nobody can get through to us...

Have you any ideas how we could avoid/reduce this potential issue?

HG: Regarding it, if you have a very high website visitors or a gaming website, it is not recommended that you have a Shared package. We highly recommend you to go with VPS or Dedicated package

PB: What is "VPS"...?
And how do you define a "gaming" website?

HG: By doing this, you get the entire server to yourself so you can create unlimited packages within the server and resell it if you wish or host large websites with heavy database and website graphics

Regarding the VPS >> virtual private server. It is an entire server that you will have for your self.

Now tell me...
What's up next?
You're the experts here.

 

[DH27]

Seems to me that with your current plan you have a traffic or bandwith cap, which resulted in the site outage. Regarding the servers, a VPS server could be an alternative, a dedicated server is just too expensive imo. The plus side of a VPS or dedicated server is that you are in full control of your installations and you don't depend on your host most of the time. The downside is that you have to configure everything yourself and everything has to be done manually.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Seems to me that with your current plan you have a traffic or bandwith cap, which resulted in the site outage. Regarding the servers, a VPS server could be an alternative, a dedicated server is just too expensive imo. The plus side of a VPS or dedicated server is that you are in full control of your installations and you don't depend on your host most of the time. The downside is that you have to configure everything yourself and everything has to be done manually.

And I know nothing about any of that.
Plus I don't think I can afford to find out.
Which means I'm going to have no other choice than to outsource it...

 

[DH27]

Alternatively, you could search for a host that has an unlimited traffic and bandwith policy for a shared package and transfer the domain there. Though that would also go along with some hassle to get the site working again.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Alternatively, you could search for a host that has an unlimited traffic and bandwith policy for a shared package and transfer the domain there. Though that would also go along with some hassle to get the site working again.

Someone else should do that search.
I know too little to judge anything sensibly.

I'm afraid outsourcing is not optional here.
As good as I might be with Matlab, I am no IT guy.
I am a sailor; or a Navigation Officer, if you will...

We should have plenty people here who can take care of this for me though...
Right?

 

[DH27]

We should have plenty people here who can take care of this for me though...
Right?

I can try to help you wherever I can with this. However, my experience is mostly limited to shared webhosting projects (though I guess I am not bad in that), only recently I started building knowledge in the space of dedicated servers, but I am still far from knowledgeable in the endeavor of hosting everything oneself.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I can try to help you wherever I can with this. However, my experience is mostly limited to shared webhosting projects (though I guess I am not bad in that), only recently I started building knowledge in the space of dedicated servers, but I am still far from knowledgeable in the endeavor of hosting everything oneself.

Well, if I read you correctly, that still puts you about 100 steps ahead of myself.

And what is PiratesAhoy!, if not a learning ground?
We ask no immediately perfection here.

Why would we?
That'd be no fun.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

For starters, our good 'ol member @Bartolomeu o Portugues now has access to this website's "cPanel".
Who else is familiar with this? And might be willing and able to assist with the IT backend?

We need to sort out the backing up; as @DH27 and @Hammie suggested.
And the forum software is so old that HostGator already broke the site once with an upgrade on their end.
Chances are that will happen again; unless we DO something about it.

I myself am not going to be doing that though.
I should make choices in what I do and don't do.
And I think it is the wisest choice for me to exclude the nitty gritty IT stuff from my personal to-do list...

(List? There is a LIST?!? )

 

[DH27]

Who else is familiar with this? And might be willing and able to assist with the IT backend?

I would enjoy to and be willing to assist on this. I have quite a lot of experience with these types of interfaces due to one of my day job taks being managing my company's websites.

And the forum software is so old that HostGator already broke the site once with an upgrade on their end.

I think this is the most urgent point to sort out, just as an idea, I could imagine upgrading the software by cloning the website to a subdomain first and in case the website breaks in the process of upgrading, forwarding the site to said subdomain. From my experience, if the forum software is very old, unfortunately, the probability for a successful upgrade on first try isn't really that high.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I would enjoy to and be willing to assist on this. I have quite a lot of experience with these types of interfaces due to one of my day job taks being managing my company's websites.

Cheers, me heartie!
Will send you a message.

I think this is the most urgent point to sort out, just as an idea, I could imagine upgrading the software by cloning the website to a subdomain first and in case the website breaks in the process of upgrading, forwarding the site to said subdomain. From my experience, if the forum software is very old, unfortunately, the probability for a successful upgrade on first try isn't really that high.

That does sound wise.
And likely.
And annoying...

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Bartolomeu o Portugues says:
"The hosting provider should be contacted to know why the server is not configured."

Since I truly am an idiot on this, before I get in touch with HostGator again, I need some slight idea of what I am talking about.
What does it mean to "configure the server"? What kind of things could be configured? Who could do that? And how?

 

[DH27]

What does it mean to "configure the server"? What kind of things could be configured? Who could do that? And how?

Hard to say with the limited information that I have, the help box that the host provided is not really that helpful either . But I can imagine that it has something to do with the the age of the server configuration? When this website and the configuration was first created, free SSL certificates or certificates for this hosting package might not have been offered yet, therefore the server might not be configured for that. What exactly "configure the server" means, I really have no clue. From your screenshot I suppose that it was tried to get a SSL certificate (which indicates that a website is secure) to work, but it didn't work. Usually you can configure a SSL certificate yourself in the hosting panel, but my guess is that you should inquire with hostgator about this problem, I think their configuration might be messed up on this issue.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Thanks, @Bartolomeu o Portugues and @DH27!
Guess I really have to contact them again then, eh?

Maybe next week then.
Hopefully finally find some measure of peace and quiet this weekend...

 

[Keith]

I did attempt to get the https going a while back, from memory there was an issue with it working with Xenforo at that time. It was doable but long winded to make it work properly so I threw it into the too hard basket. Xenforo have had a number of updates since then so I imagine it will be easier.

With the hosting, the hostgator baby is the most basic setup. You don't want to go down the dedicated server road especially if you don't want the hassle of dealing with it. My suggestion would be to stay on a shared host but just get one which allocates more resources.

As an example Website Hosting | 100% Australian Owned | VentraIP Australia shows the different packages and the resources allocated to them. I use the "Starter" one for my company website but the "Premium" for my online store. The hostagor baby is like the "starter" . Also I'm not suggesting you use the Australian host, it just happens to be my one.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I did attempt to get the https going a while back, from memory there was an issue with it working with Xenforo at that time. It was doable but long winded to make it work properly so I threw it into the too hard basket. Xenforo have had a number of updates since then so I imagine it will be easier.

Thanks for confirming on that!
Better wait then until, hopefully, @DH27 manages to figure out how to upgrade the forum software.