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Ask HN: What do people use for cheap, low-traffic WordPress hosting these days?

4 points by username223 ↗ HN
I'm currently hosting a low-traffic personal blog on Bluehost for $3.95/mo, but it's up for renewal. They initially tried to make me pay $10.99/mo, but were easily talked down to $6.95/mo. Given that a VPS is about $5/mo, this is still a ripoff. What do people use these days for cheap Wordpress hosting?

Note: I would rather not switch away from Wordpress, since I don't want to break existing links.

15 comments

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gk1
Sorry to be blunt but if you consider a difference of $1.95 to be "a ripoff" then that doesn't leave a lot of options. The only cheaper alternative I can think of is hosting directly on Wordpress.com for $2.99/month: https://wordpress.com/pricing/
username223
The difference is $3.95/mo vs. $6.95/mo with a 3-year contract, i.e. $108 more than the previous hosting deal, or $70.20 more than a VPS. It's a ripoff.
codegeek
You have to decide if it is worth your time to do a new server/migration for a difference of $1.95/month. If you anyway want to move, then consider DigitalOcean or vultr.com droplets.
username223
I have to decide if it is worth dealing with this nonsense every few years to keep an ad-free personal site online. I'll look at your suggestions.
codegeek
In that case, definitely DigitalOcean or vultr. I have WP sites on both and cannot complain. For $5, you get to control it all. The only downside is that there is not too much magic and you need to install things if needed on the server end.
thenomad
I'd recommend a DO instance, or one of their competitors. IIRC there's a VPS provider out there that does $3pm VPSes, but I'm not sure the $2pm difference is worth it over going for a provider you know.

Alternatively if you really want to minimise your costs right down, migrate from WP to Hugo. You can do so without breaking any links if you pay attention to your permalink structure. Then host on S3, where your bill will, for a low-traffic site, be more like $5 per year.

Additional upside to that since you mention having to deal with the hassle every couple of years: HTML isn't going to go out of date any time soon.

jordif
One of the best option is Digital Ocean. You can configure a Droplet (server) with a WP setup without any skill in linux or sysadmin. Their first price is €5/month. Their customer service is very good in any price, and their documentation too.

I really don't recomment GoDaddy, their hosting is very slow.

XtalJ
I was just about to mention Digital Ocean. Very simple and easy, but MySQL is eating all my available memory...
jordif
You can have different problems. - Server requirements too low to handle your daily traffic - WP custom development with slow querys - Are you using any caching system and image optimization?
alex_g
My Namecheap hosting is incredibly cheap, their support is decent, and it's pretty sweet to have my domains and sites all on the same account.
akulbe
nearlyfreespeech.net

It's pay as you go. I've not found it any cheaper than that.

learningmore
I was surprised to find a Wordpress site with average MySQL usage and 1gb of traffic per month is $1.34 a month, $15 a year.
wise_young_man
I've been building a startup to address this need in the cloud hosting space that I'm calling Pagefog[1]. I'm very close to release soon. Would you be interested in talking to me about your needs and seeing if it could be a good fit?

My goal is to make an easier service for managed WP hosting on your own cloud servers whether you use AWS, Digital Ocean, or a VM in your datacenter. Everything that is built out is setup for performance and tuned for WordPress. There are some unique feature like auto-setup of SSL certs with LetsEncrypt as well.

[1]: http://pagefog.com

learningmore
The $2/mo BuyVM reseller plan offers 20GB storage, reasonably fast response times and a full cpanel. You can host a bunch of websites each with their own site, email, logins, etc. It is nice to create a new site for a friend if they need one, but leave the management to someone else if there is server trouble.

If you like to tinker and your website doesn't require massive uptime and you have a very small amount of traffic, you might look into LowEndCat[2]

[1] www.buyvm.com [2] www.lowendcat.com or search for low end Spirit, which are budget-focused tiny VPS servers for $3/year. I found one that is 16 cents a month. Great uptime and I don't need anything more than 64 MB. ;)

simplehuman
You will find a lot of low end options here - https://lowendbox.com/. And then install cloudron.io (that helps keeping the server and the wordpress instances up to date). Alternately, go for something like serverpilot?