Web Hosting Options in 2020 for Wordpress Websites

[Bryn]

I understand your frustration. Due to various factors with old servers and new ones coming online posting every servers specs isn't always possible but I do get your concern regarding this. When it comes to dedicated or cloud servers we have a dedicated team member available that looks after these clients but support is also able to assist.

Addons can also vary in price and the frequency they change. Like a static IP address. Afrihost is struggling with IPv4 exhaustion so the price of a static ip might change so always changing the website is labour intensive.

All our server are hosted at MTN Gallo Manor data centre. We have our own hardware and all is hosted on our own network. We have a large section in the Data Centre that is only hosting our hardware.


Most clients that want to host a blog don't usually care much about all this. They want their website to be hosted on a fast and reliable server. We promise 100% uptime because things do go wrong that might cause some downtime but we do aim to keep that number as close to 100% as possible.

I appreciate the reply. What you're talking about represents a lack of certainty for me, which is generally something I won't go near unless we're talking about AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. And even then they have detailed pricing calculators available.

I can understand that your shared hosting clients don't care for details, but the rest of your hosting clients do. Those pages should contain as much detail as possible.

 

[Stephan777]

@Stephan777

We did not make the list.

I see you are moving sites from us. What happened? Did something go wrong?

Wasn't my decision, but yes, we wanted to consolidate everything to one Hosting company. We are using 4 different companies currently... :-(

 

[Stephan777]

Hi everyone! Thanks for the awesome responses!! We decided to go with Xneelo as our biggest client has always hosted with them, so we switched them over to our account now and will be adding the rest.

Konsole does suck, I must admit, but the support is really good so far.

 

[Jade @ Absolute Hosting]

Hi everyone! Thanks for the awesome responses!! We decided to go with Xneelo as our biggest client has always hosted with them, so we switched them over to our account now and will be adding the rest.

Konsole does suck, I must admit, but the support is really good so far.

Thanks for the feedback @Stephan777 and glad that you have managed to come to a decision.

Reach out if you need additional wordpress hosting or regular hosting.

 

[Stephan777]

1. There is no single answer for such an open question. It depends what your goals are. For WordPress-based hosting, I'd say your best bet right now is almost certainly a VPS from Absolute Hosting. They use Intel hardware, which performs better for PHP and MySQL workloads related to WordPress. Their support is great. Prices are great. You can't go wrong with Absolute. As a general rule, I wouldn't consider any hosts other than Domains.co.za and Absolute Hosting.
2. It has been 100% conclusively proven that PageSpeed/Lighthouse benchmarks have no impact on search results whatsoever. The impact comes in with your conversion rates, as it has also been 100% conclusively proven that every few hundred milliseconds in unnecessary load times materially decreases your conversions. It also impacts your brand image.
3. If your hosting currently sucks, you should see metrics improve across the board with competent hosting. Probably not so likely to be a big difference with bottom-end shared hosting. The primary determinant is always going to be the state of your actual website. Was it built with a bloated page builder? Does it have a million plugins? Are some of those plugins bloated? How have things been optimised for speed on-site? Are images compressed and not excessively large? Hosting is a big part of the picture, but it cannot overcome the issues that come with a bloated site.

Oh, and cPanel sucks. Don't use that as a requirement for anything of quality.



Imo, Xneelo hosting sucks unless you're on a very expensive package. Performance is so noticeably sluggish compared to alternatives and their KonsoleH control panel is the worst s**t in the world.

Excellent customer support though. But there are other hosts who also have excellent customer support. If you're looking for colocation, Xneelo are great I'm sure. Heck, probably a lot of web hosts in SA going that route themselves.



I have a 2-core, 4GB memory EC2 instance in Northern California due to the hundreds of dollars in AWS credit I have. Performance is about the same as DigitalOcean and Linode servers, and worse than Vultr High Frequency. If you have a solid hosting setup with Snapshot Failover or High Availability, I'm not sure that the extreme premium that AWS charges for comparable specs is worth the money. Especially at scale. Downtime almost never occurs with the less-costly major cloud providers. Maybe once every two years there is 30-60 minutes of downtime for some reason, which can be easily mitigated in most circumstances. More frequently than that is a few minutes every few months, and for some locations only.

Before taking out any server from a major cloud provider, you can check uptime on Cloud Harmony's status page. You can see the dodge locations a mile away. Obviously not applicable to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud though as they have 100% uptime.

Load balancing, CDNs, premium DNS, failover DNS etc. can be had from more cost-effective sources like BunnyCDN and DNS Made Easy.



If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is only one reason you can have ultra-cheap hosting - a gazillion sites per server.

Thanks!!

We have a lot of plugins, images and videos on https://www.selfiebox.co.za
The other sites aren't too bloated.

 

[Bryn]

Thanks!!

We have a lot of plugins, images and videos on https://www.selfiebox.co.za
The other sites aren't too bloated.

That domain looks parked to me?

Hi everyone! Thanks for the awesome responses!! We decided to go with Xneelo as our biggest client has always hosted with them, so we switched them over to our account now and will be adding the rest.

Konsole does suck, I must admit, but the support is really good so far.

I hope you're referring to something that's a cut above the bottom-tier shared hosting, or the reseller hosting which is effectively the same thing. I've always seen notably poor performance from those.

 

[Stephan777]

That domain looks parked to me?

I hope you're referring to something that's a cut above the bottom-tier shared hosting, or the reseller hosting which is effectively the same thing. I've always seen notably poor performance from those.

Hi @Bryn. It was probably during the transfer that it showed parked, it's online now

 

[Bryn]

I understand your frustration. Due to various factors with old servers and new ones coming online posting every servers specs isn't always possible but I do get your concern regarding this. When it comes to dedicated or cloud servers we have a dedicated team member available that looks after these clients but support is also able to assist.

Addons can also vary in price and the frequency they change. Like a static IP address. Afrihost is struggling with IPv4 exhaustion so the price of a static ip might change so always changing the website is labour intensive.

All our server are hosted at MTN Gallo Manor data centre. We have our own hardware and all is hosted on our own network. We have a large section in the Data Centre that is only hosting our hardware.


Most clients that want to host a blog don't usually care much about all this. They want their website to be hosted on a fast and reliable server. We promise 100% uptime because things do go wrong that might cause some downtime but we do aim to keep that number as close to 100% as possible.

Just reviving this thread to say that I took out an enterprise cloud server with Afrihost two days ago to check things out, and that it has easily been the worst hosting experience I've had with any company on any continent.

Your sales page says nothing about nonsensical LVM storage partitions being put into place that require a bunch of work to actually achieve the advertised storage. And although you do at least state it on the sale page, dynamic memory is absolute crap and much worse in practice than I anticipated (totally stuffs up monitoring, thresholds and alerts - seriously, who can work like this).

You claim that cloud server clients are looked after but all your support did was send me a link to a 9-page tutorial on how to work with LVM and called it a day. And now I'm presumably stuck with this heap of unusable and expensive trash for the whole of January thanks to being past your cancellation cut-off of the 15th of Dec.

 

[Mr Scratch]

Just reviving this thread to say that I took out an enterprise cloud server with Afrihost two days ago to check things out, and that it has easily been the worst hosting experience I've had with any company on any continent.

Your sales page says nothing about nonsensical LVM storage partitions being put into place that require a bunch of work to actually achieve the advertised storage. And although you do at least state it on the sale page, dynamic memory is absolute crap and much worse in practice than I anticipated (totally stuffs up monitoring, thresholds and alerts - seriously, who can work like this).

You claim that cloud server clients are looked after but all your support did was send me a link to a 9-page tutorial on how to work with LVM and called it a day. And now I'm presumably stuck with this heap of unusable and expensive trash for the whole of January thanks to being past your cancellation cut-off of the 15th of Dec.

Just wanted to chime in here - Afrihost dumped their old boxes to employees for free, and did not remove the disks from the boxes. I am in possession of two "Silver" servers with their WD disks still installed with the OS. Zero care about customer security LMFAO

If anyone wants them, feel free to PM me

 

[Thor]

I would sue them.

 

[AfriNatic]

Just reviving this thread to say that I took out an enterprise cloud server with Afrihost two days ago to check things out, and that it has easily been the worst hosting experience I've had with any company on any continent.

Your sales page says nothing about nonsensical LVM storage partitions being put into place that require a bunch of work to actually achieve the advertised storage. And although you do at least state it on the sale page, dynamic memory is absolute crap and much worse in practice than I anticipated (totally stuffs up monitoring, thresholds and alerts - seriously, who can work like this).

You claim that cloud server clients are looked after but all your support did was send me a link to a 9-page tutorial on how to work with LVM and called it a day. And now I'm presumably stuck with this heap of unusable and expensive trash for the whole of January thanks to being past your cancellation cut-off of the 15th of Dec.

Morning,

Can you send me your clientzone email for me to advise on a way forward?

 

[AfriNatic]

Just wanted to chime in here - Afrihost dumped their old boxes to employees for free, and did not remove the disks from the boxes. I am in possession of two "Silver" servers with their WD disks still installed with the OS. Zero care about customer security LMFAO

If anyone wants them, feel free to PM me

Morning,

This is concerning. I want to investigate this as a matter of urgency. Can I get in touch with you to discuss?

 

[MrGray]

Just adding my 2c - not affiliated with them at all, and I know this sounds like an advertorial, but for WP hosting https://www.cloudways.com is awesome. Never looked back - this has literally saved hundreds of support hours managing 100s of WP sites. For e.g. they snapshot your WP for instant rollbacks (no spending hours trying to unravel malware, etc, issues), they proactively monitor plugins for malware & update them automatically, they monitor for dodgy network traffic and proactively block/alert etc, plus in the background you choose which actual cloud platform you're comfortable with (AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr, etc). You can roll out a new site in minutes, or import/move/copy sites with ease. Highly, highly recommended.

 

[Bryn]

Just adding my 2c - not affiliated with them at all, and I know this sounds like an advertorial, but for WP hosting https://www.cloudways.com is awesome. Never looked back - this has literally saved hundreds of support hours managing 100s of WP sites. For e.g. they snapshot your WP for instant rollbacks (no spending hours trying to unravel malware, etc, issues), they proactively monitor plugins for malware & update them automatically, they monitor for dodgy network traffic and proactively block/alert etc, plus in the background you choose which actual cloud platform you're comfortable with (AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr, etc). You can roll out a new site in minutes, or import/move/copy sites with ease. Highly, highly recommended.

Not suitable for agencies considering what Cloudways adds to the cost of each server. And you can't add custom servers. But otherwise, yes Cloudways is brilliant if you just need one or two servers with good support.

 

[Bryn]

Morning,

Can you send me your clientzone email for me to advise on a way forward?

There seems to be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Koketso is on the scene and seems happy to get this partition silliness sorted out. I'll update once I hear back from him.

By the way, do you know off-hand what these CPUs are? Or if not, what sort of length of time the current batch has been in service?

 

[AfriNatic]

There seems to be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Koketso is on the scene and seems happy to get this partition silliness sorted out. I'll update once I hear back from him.

By the way, do you know off-hand what these CPUs are? Or if not, what sort of length of time the current batch has been in service?

Unfortunately I don't have those details. These are questions our Server Admin can give you all the answers and our sales lady that handles servers only.

My offer still stands for me to put you in touch with her at anytime. Very friendly lady and I'm sure she can give you all the answers.

 

[Mr Scratch]

Morning,

This is concerning. I want to investigate this as a matter of urgency. Can I get in touch with you to discuss?

No reason to, just ask your DC staff to trace back which servers were dumped to which employee (if you even keep records of company inventory) and stop doing that stuff.

 

[Bryn]

Unfortunately I don't have those details. These are questions our Server Admin can give you all the answers and our sales lady that handles servers only.

My offer still stands for me to put you in touch with her at anytime. Very friendly lady and I'm sure she can give you all the answers.

Okay, update time. Koketso was very helpful and handled the schlep of the partitions. Unfortunately, the performance of the server is utterly dire. One of the weakest performers I've yet checked out. TTFB for a test online store went from 150ms average to 900+ms. Compute-intensive tasks like refreshing cart fragments went from ~300ms to 1.9 sec. Navigating page to page is noticeably slower. I have to assume the only explanation is extremely weak compute performance, which will effect almost everything negatively.

I mean, considering how stingy Afrihost is with memory allocation, it makes me wonder what is going on with CPU clock speeds and the age and tier of the Intel hardware.

Are you able to get me out of this billing arrangement? The thought of paying a grand in January for a server I can't use for anything is pretty depressing.

Edit: No worries. I saw that it was possible to cancel from the end of the current month. Phew.

 

[Bryn]

Unfortunately I don't have those details. These are questions our Server Admin can give you all the answers and our sales lady that handles servers only.

My offer still stands for me to put you in touch with her at anytime. Very friendly lady and I'm sure she can give you all the answers.

I was just charged R910 by Afrihost, despite clearly opting to terminate the service at the end of December. Absolutely disgraceful. I don't even have a hosting service in the Hosting section of the Clientzone.

 

[AfriNatic]

I was just charged R910 by Afrihost, despite clearly opting to terminate the service at the end of December. Absolutely disgraceful. I don't even have a hosting service in the Hosting section of the Clientzone.

Morning,

Can you send me a pm with the clientzone email so I can have a look why you were charged.