Need more flexibility than shared hosting

Kemik

Kemik

Kemik

Soldato
Joined
7 Nov 2005
Posts
4,958
Location
Widnes
I have had a shared hosting account for over 10 years now with various providers. However, as the internet has continued to grow, I've found myself restricted by shared hosting. For example, I want to be able to easily roll out Laravel, use Tailwind CSS or Vue JS without using their CDN, etc.

I don't get much traffic - it's mainly personal projects - so my actual needs aren't high.

So far I can think of:
  • Running a local server (requires investment)
  • Running a local virtual machine (only useful for development - not deployment).
  • Rent a VPS from someone like LiquidWeb for about $30 per month (expensive).
  • Use AWS (not a clue).
Really, what I need is cPanel with some root flexibility. I'm worried if I go for a VPS or AWS I won't have hardened it or will need to constantly maintain the OS updates.

Any suggestions? Is there any easy way around this?
 
I used Vultr for ages as a cheap VPS. It starts at $2.50/month. I was running Centminmod on top of Centos which dealt with all security updates etc automatically and for managing setting up new domains / letsencrypt SSL certificates etc. The uptime was rock solid.

What I'd probably do nowadays is learn Docker / Docker-Compose (it's really easy) and install that onto a VPS instance and use that to separate my applications from each other and from the host OS. In the worst case your docker container may get broken into if you have a dodgy PHP script, but it'll be extremely unlikely they'll be able to break out from there into the host OS (there were some Docker exploits that allowed this, but they'll be patched now I'm sure).

We mostly use Azure at work (it's superior to AWS in my opinion) but both Azure / AWS aren't that price competitive for smaller projects. The cheapest VM starts at ~£10/month, and app service around £40/month. App service is PaaS (platform as a service) which means Microsoft deal with everything below your application code e.g.,backups, the web server software, the server OS updates, scaling your app out to multiple instances and load balancing when your site is being hit hard by users so it's definitely worth if if you want peace of mind. All you have to worry about is making sure your app code is OK.
 
Laravel / Laravel Mix etc work perfectly well on any cPanel environment - you don't need root access to a server for these things. Not all hosts support running a full node app however so worth checking if you do need to do that.

Most providers running Cloudlinux should as it natively supports Node via mod_passenger, although (in our case) we just enable by request currently.
 
Beansprout said:
Laravel / Laravel Mix etc work perfectly well on any cPanel environment - you don't need root access to a server for these things. Not all hosts support running a full node app however so worth checking if you do need to do that.

Most providers running Cloudlinux should as it natively supports Node via mod_passenger, although (in our case) we just enable by request currently.
Click to expand...

How can I roll out Laravel without Composer access?
 
Kemik said:
How can I roll out Laravel without Composer access?
Click to expand...
Composer is just a php script like any other, I wonder how many people have bought VPSs just because there’s some idea it needs root access - it can be installed in /usr/bin but works just as well in a user home directory.

Mind you it would be harder to install (maybe impossible to use) without SSH or Phar, both things that crappy or old shared hosting won’t provide. And with VPSs so cheap, if you have sysadmin skills and time then it’s always worth a play around.

CPanel for all its faults is a pretty good dev environment these days when running Cloudlinux (full user isolation, node, all PHP versions etc) and with SSH and git enabled.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom