I've been thinking of writing a blog post on this topic for some time, and the recent SolusVM-related hacks pushed me to finally put my thoughts into words: On Low-Cost Web Hosting/VPSes.
In the article, I offer a few strategies for keeping your site up, and reasons why you should consider paying more for your hosting if your website is important to your business or generates revenue:
- You get what you pay for
- Always keep your own backups
- Don't host mission-critical sites and software on cheap hosts
- Don't rely on one server, or one hosting provider
It kills me every time I see someone write about their site being down and unrecoverable here and on other forums; follow these bits of advice, and you won't ever have to learn the hard lessons many have learned as a result of the recent hacks.
I thought I'd post this here because I love reading other people's thoughts on backups, redundancy, and cost-effective hosting in these forums, and wanted to offer some of my advice for people who haven't been 'fortunate' enough to have their own low end hosting providers let them down yet :)
Note: I'm not in any way disparaging @Nick_A, @CVPS_Chris, or any of the others involved with RamNode, ChicagoVPS, or another hosting provider that was a victim of a SolusVM-related hack—they have done great work (imo) keeping their customers up to date with their situations, and have done as much as (and more than!) would be expected in terms of getting servers back up and running as fast as they can.