Alternatives to Hetzner (poor business practises)

I found Hetzner to be really accommodating in all of the dealings I have had over the years, I do have a bunch of truservplus servers with them though and all management/hosting is done by me.
It makes sense though that their main business model is co-location and their truserv rented servers, so they are probably trying to lower admin overheads.
 
Gnome said:
Remind me again why using something like domains.co.za is better than just going AWS from the get-go?
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For the average user, a cPanel web hosting package will offer a much more user-friendly, feature-rich hosting experience than hosting with AWS. AWS Lightsail is basically a barebones VPS.
 
chopsky said:
For the average user, a cPanel web hosting package will offer a much more user-friendly, feature-rich hosting experience than hosting with AWS. AWS Lightsail is basically a barebones VPS.
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There are also AMIs that offer cPanel out of the box. Select Instance, select cPanel AMI, click launch

These cPanel hosting options, do they use VMs so that each customer is hosted separately?
Or is it a colocated PaaS type deal?
 
I'm a domains.co.za hosting reseller, so contact me and we can discuss a customised solution that works for you :)
 
Gnome said:
There are also AMIs that offer cPanel out of the box. Select Instance, select cPanel AMI, click launch
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When using AWS Lightsail and considering cPanel hosting, you then also need to take into account the cPanel license cost, which is around $15 p/m (making total cost $20 p/m).
 
Just to add a different approach to this debate.

I would rather look into joining a smaller web development company, possibly one that's local when dealing with
websites. If you are reading this and in Bloemfontein, Just send me an email...

Now before I promote my own company I will mention a large established company.

Afrihost... If I had to recommend any hosting company in SA. It would be them.
https://www.afrihost.com/site/product/linux_hosting

Their costs are decent, their support is as well. To me anyways.


All the above mentioned companies are bigger more established companies. The problem with such companies are often the
fact that most of their clients are just numbers. They do not feel it when a client comes and goes, and
although they are customer orientated nobody there really knows you.

Whenever you are just a number the support levels drops severely. And when there's no "relationship" that hurts things further.
There's this saying that business is business saying but I do not want to take the humanity out of it.

Now some would say there's a trade off... Why not buy directly from the supplier will it not be cheaper?
Well i run a dedicated server, It costs me around R5000. The average person would not be able to pay that surely.
However. When taking my server into account and assessing the average resource usage per website. I can
make prices that do compete with the big players.

Considering that a smaller web development company can actually make just as good of a price as any large monopoly.
When giving the price example I ask R50 per month which includes the domain renewal. Paired with a 20% discount for
paying hosting in advance. And SSL does not cost thousands Roughly R100 per year on a decent server. Compared to R1000* in some instances.


Even after this there's still enough profit to cover any support provided and make profit.

So I would say try and find a local web agency who does not ask hundreds for hosting.
When your website goes down you want a contact who can solve the problem.
I would be willing to help anyone who is looking for a host with decent support.

PS: We are based in Bloemfontein

At CyberDevs.co.za we ask R50 per month which includes the domain renewal.
And for an extra R10 per month we can also include SSL.

And our servers are with Liquid Web. So one of the highest rated providers in dedicated servers in the world.
And they are known to be pricey...


There's a lot of great alternatives and we all have our own tastes. Some like MTN, some like Vodacom.
They all have their own set of problems. But there's still options.
 
Thanks everyone for your comments and advice.

I was extremely reluctant to move away from Hetzner after being with them since the early 2000s. Oh well, if they can no longer make simple, affordable hosting work, so be it.

I've moved offshore (again, very reluctantly) to FastComet, with cPanel, 1 hosted website (but practially unlimited everything else: domains, subdomains, emails, databases, traffic), 15 GB of SSD, webmail, Let's Encrypt SSL, and free .org registration and free .org annual renewals, at about the USD equivalent of R35/month fixed for three years, with the same renewal price guaranteed in 2021 (in USD of course, but no low price baiting it appears from feedback and reviews). Tech support has been good. But it was the 15 GB of storage that was the real clincher, perfect for my simple needs, much better than Hetzner's R99/month for 5 GB. YMMV of course.
 
gfmalan said:
May I ask what the 15gb would be used for?
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Sure... mostly photos to be shared with family and friends. I don't use Facebook, Flickr, 500px, Google, Dropbox, iCloud or any other service, because I don't want them to "own" my work, mess with it, downgrade quality, inject advertising, or simply discontinue their service etc. Having my own site gives me control.
 
Gray1 said:
Sure... mostly photos to be shared with family and friends. I don't use Facebook, Flickr, 500px, Google, Dropbox, iCloud or any other service, because I don't want them to "own" my work, mess with it, downgrade quality, inject advertising, or simply discontinue their service etc. Having my own site gives me control.
Click to expand...

Ok cool!

Are you using NextCloud or something else? Or plain FTP?
 
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