It has just been five days and I had to upgrade my virtual server, here is the thing the lowest and the cheapest don’t work. I went on a wild search for a perfect home for my site, I just wanted a reliable and cheap hosting service. After all that search, I end up at the same place where I started.
There is nothing as cheap, the cost of having a personal blog on a reliable host has gone to the moon. With the rising dollar prices, it just adds up to the fire. I look at cPanel hosting and 4 of the cloud service providers in the market for hosting. Amazon, Google, Alibaba and DigitalOcean. Out of the four cloud providers I selected Alibaba for just the fact that their pricing is $0.50 less and the configuration is way more than the others and Google cloud was the most expensive one.
In simple comparison I found that Alibaba’s cloud provides twice the resources, I took the 1-GB memory plan. Plus in Alibaba, I could do pre-payments as they call this a subscription plan. In all the cloud the only way of getting an unexpected bill is if my plan parameters are breached. In all of them, there are a total of 6 components CPU, Memory, Data transfer, Data disk, Bandwidth and Operating software.
I had some concerns about a few of them so, I contacted support and asked them about the system. Now, OS we use is open source so, that’s free. The machine we use has no auto-scaling so, the disk, ram and CPU are already paid off. I don’t know the Bandwidth provided by DO and AWS but on Alibaba, it is mentioned peak bandwidth of 30Mbps so it is also paid off. The only remaining part is Data Transfer and according to them, I would get an email alert on 50, 85 and 95 per cent of usage in any month.
At Alibaba Cloud, the Data Transfer is at 2TB and others are providing 1TB for this site reaching even a 1TB level will be mind-blowing. I am currently sitting on 848.9MB and that is because I was playing around with the machine.
So for one I would shift from cPanel and try how it goes. With the shift, I had to reinstall Ghost. I also did some changes to the theme so that it looks and feels good. I am not a coder so I copy-pasted and Google searched for answers. There are a lot of changes that I am facing on Ghost. I am still learning things and my way around Ghost. I think they will bring many changes in the coming days as this platform has some downsides. Just for example the images that I used in my previous post there is no way on the platform to view them. There are no categories only tags, and that also only one tag is displayed on the post. As I keep on using the platform I come to know about these issues.
Coming back to the hosting part, if anyone is planning to come on the self-hosting way for Ghost please avoid the 512Mb memory it doesn’t work. The site will keep on going down. Nowadays the applications are resource hungry so, keep this in mind. I have tried it and know this from my first-hand experience. I had earlier decided and will stick to the plan of using Ghost and Alibaba’s cloud so, will not back out, so early.
