Cheap, good hosting? Mainly for phpbb3, around £30/year budget?

Stormster

Stormster

Stormster

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
4,671
Location
Stoke-on-Trent
Hi guys. I'm looking for some hosting on the cheap, don't need a load of space or bandwidth really. It's for a car club I'm part of, I've offered to take control of the hosting, web based stuff etc. I'm no expert, but neither is anyone else on the team. We mainly need it to run phpbb, some email addresses, hosting of a boggo looking website etc. Nowt too special but it has to be reliable and quick.

Currently they're using this package from 123-reg: http://www.123-reg.co.uk/web-hosting/starter-plus.shtml

Now the forum is getting busier, we constantly have errors using this hosting. The specs in terms of 2 gig space and 25 gig a month bandwidth are fine, I am just wondering can we beat the price by essentially half for the same space, bandwidth but maybe more features such as unlimited addon domains, email addresses, sql db's, stuff like that.

I have offered to pay. I just think we can do better for less. I may even pay a little more and move my own personal site onto the hosting if we can run a couple of domains and sort of virtual email servers (i.e. mail.mydomain.co.uk and mail.carclub.co.uk so we can send and receive emails).

cpanel as the control panel would be great, had that on old hosting in the past and it was nice to use. My current cheap nasty hosting for my personal stuff uses plesk which I dislike.

Cheers guys :)
 
I use Vidahost and their support is fantastic, not that I have had to use it for any downtime-related reasons in the two years I've had my account. You really don't want to go with hosts touting "Unlimited" plans as nothing is really unlimited - they usually oversell their services and you end up stuck on an overloaded server.

How many users do expect to have on your forum? I run a picture-heavy forum with ~70 active users and I am on the Starter package, never once have I come close to using 25GB of bandwidth. If it's a new site then why not save yourself some cash and get the Starter package and when the site starts to grow ask Vidahost to upgrade your package?
 
We have 161 members (pretty much a local car enthusiasts club), about 60-70 are active, so it can be quite busy sometimes. But we have 25gb/month bandwidth as it is and don't get all that close. So should imagine the 30 quid a year package will be fine :) We've been running nearly a year but we do wanna push things a bit more now we have a bit of a "team" on the go. Obviously the forum is the focal point that everyone can access though.

Looking around, for quality hosting, it does seem a fair ol' deal. Unlimited stuff aint essential aslong as there is enough, which there seems to be with the vidahost deal.

More db's will come in handy in the future if we expand with blogs, galleries and stuff.
 
Stormster said:
We have 161 members (pretty much a local car enthusiasts club), about 60-70 are active, so it can be quite busy sometimes. But we have 25gb/month bandwidth as it is and don't get all that close. So should imagine the 30 quid a year package will be fine :) We've been running nearly a year but we do wanna push things a bit more now we have a bit of a "team" on the go. Obviously the forum is the focal point that everyone can access though.

Looking around, for quality hosting, it does seem a fair ol' deal. Unlimited stuff aint essential aslong as there is enough, which there seems to be with the vidahost deal.

More db's will come in handy in the future if we expand with blogs, galleries and stuff.
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Sorry, I thought your thread title said £30/month not £30/year - hence me saying save yourself some money with the starter package. With 70 active users you will cope with the Starter package fine, unless your users have _massive_ galleries which get hit hundreds of times a day!

If you want to see what the speed is like with Vidahost then let me know and I'll upload a large(ish) file for you. The link in my sig (NEUE) is the forum I run, if you want to see how a forum (vB, not phpBB) performs on Vida.
 
Will have a look at your link and yeah if you fancy upping say 50ish meg file or something I'll have a ganders how quickly it downloads :) Ta for that :)

Will have a quick look at dreamhosts but seems the vida recommendations seem good.
 
Stormster said:
Will have a look at your link and yeah if you fancy upping say 50ish meg file or something I'll have a ganders how quickly it downloads :) Ta for that :)

Will have a quick look at dreamhosts but seems the vida recommendations seem good.
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File uploaded to http://www.northeasturbex.co.uk/test.zip - it's a blank file created with fsutil so it won't unzip :p Can you let me know when you have downloaded it and I'll remove it from the webspace.

Cheers
 
I'm only connected at 2989kbps (orange freeee broadband lol)

but it downloaded in 2 mins 56 seconds @ 290kb/sec average.

So that seems fine to me :)

Cheers mate for that.
 
Stormster said:
I'm only connected at 2989kbps (orange freeee broadband lol)

but it downloaded in 2 mins 56 seconds @ 290kb/sec average.

So that seems fine to me :)

Cheers mate for that.
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2989kbps is bliss. I'm lucky if I get 2400kbps at home, and that's not an ISP restriction :p
 
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