Shared hosting recommendations
Hey guys,
Long time lurker, and used to be active on the other green forum - great to see familiar usernames, hope everyone's well.
In a pickle - I support a charity in the UK and we're moving some bits and bobs around. Current webhost isn't quite cutting it (not their fault), and I kinda want something I can set and forget, and not be bothered with. Also, as it's a charity it's the case that cheap is very much good.
Website is a WordPress based monstrosity held together by hope, sellotape, and a Frankenstein Elementor/ACP that has zero documentation and too many plugins. Currently with NameCrane and we're whacking the CPU limits, despite really minimal traffic - it breaks Elementor's back end, and requires me to swear at it for the people who 'manage the website' to be able to use it again. Things are as cached as they can be on the frontend without things breaking.
I could move it over to a VPS, sure, but then there's the issue of nobody being able to manage that if/when I'm no longer supporting - so shared hosting is realistically the option.
So, looking for something that's silly cheap, and would be alright with a badly optimised wordpress site to hit the CPU a couple times a day when someone's in wp-admin.
We're currently on NameCrane's 25GB $3.75/qr plan for reference on how cheapskate this needs to be - thought that'd sort things 6 months ago or so, apparently not.
If anyone has any ideas on hosts, I'd really appreciate it. I'd also welcome creative ways to say 'you need to fix this monstrosity' and/or 'increase the budget on things - I'm completely aware of the deep sighs people will have reading this.
Thoughts and prayers.
Comments
When you say shared hosting, I am guessing you mean cPanel?
cPanel, DirectAdmin, anything else that's alright
Hey @ElliotJ good to see you here.
Maybe @MichaelCee can offer something?
TierHive - Hourly VPS - NAT Native - /24 per customer - DE, UK, SG, CA, USA x3, FR, AU, PL, NL
FREE tokens on sign up, try before you buy. | Join us on Reddit
I feel your pain. Right now we're on WP engine and hitting the limits pretty hard with an unsupported elementor installation as well. My solution is to continue harping on them to going back to the old website.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
Honestly, if you're hitting CPU limits on the 'crane with "minimal traffic", then the only realistic thing you can do is sort out the mess that is your WordPress install; you're not going to find much at charity-friendly prices that are going to add an order of magnitude more CPU power.
Hi.
Maybe, and this will remain as optional for your case. Maybe we can have cheap web hosting, but as you know you need to optimize your Wordpress and maybe considering migrating to other solution like Hugo CMS? Grav CMS? DLE CMS?
You can check our Web Hosting Offer just for 12€ per year (yes, this is right. But this optional)
https://alexhost.com/shared-hosting/
Note: This Shared Hosting is different of others, this may have different rules. We recommend you check our AUP before proceeding. This package is not offshore and the price says everything, you're welcome to host your Wordpress in this package / plan. You can use a promo code or discount code, but we don't make refunds if someone uses promo codes.
Anything before buying, contact us if you have any question.
Best Regards,
Alexhost
Solomon's solution would be to look into that site, and if nothing else, see about a caching plugin like LiteSpeed with a compatible host.
Cloudflare bot protection could also make a big difference in reducing server load.
How much storage does the site need, roughly, if it's not too indescreet to ask?
🔧 BikeGremlin guides & resources
It could also be something like bluehost where the CPU is so maxed out, even lightweight blogs feel like they are very "heavy"...
NameCrane's 25GB $3.75/qr plan -> 1 CPU Core @ 5Ghz+ / 2GB DDR5 RAM
Hostbrr 100GB $15/y plan -> 4 CPU Cores / 4 GB RAM
So maybe you can go with hostbrr.com :-)
Unless your site is highly dynamic, I would go "static" route. There are several plugins for Wordpress that convert your site to a completely static site and would take little to no resources served this way. Depending on what plugins you go with, some also have support for comments.
Example one https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/
With the static site, you can reduce the cost even further. Depending on how much space you need, you could use Cloudflare Pages which are free and would work just fine for it.
Long time no see Elliot!
DragonWebHost runs mostly on NameCrane, except Singapore. If you ever cut the fat from your set up, I'd be more than happy to accommodate the charity free of charge (Technically I'd charge £0.01/year for anti-fraud).
Unless it ends up being some sort of immoral charity that steals lollipops from kids or something...
Michael from DragonWebHost & OnePoundEmail
maybe you need wprocket plugin
Yes, what a slow-ass WP site weighed down with plugins needs is more plugins :-)
As many have pointed out already, just fix the website.
I feel your pain, I've been in your shoes many times. Charity work, no money for anything and the "but the website works" attitude, but trust me, trying to solve this problem without actually fixing the website will just make it your problem, forever and ever and ever. Every time the website crashes you will have to fix it, because you fixed it last time.
A shared hosting on 'crane should be able to take a pretty decent beating before hitting any limits, so the hosting is not your problem, changing host will not fix anything.
Thank you for all the responses guys, really appreciated.
I possibly should've clarified things a bit better in my waffle of a post - it's the wp-admin side of things (uncached) that's causing the issues - frontend is reasonably well cached, no real issues there. Just crappy ol' elementor and plugins within the backend making things scream.
Storage is tiny, 5GB max?
Hostbrr 100GB $15/y plan -> 4 CPU Cores / 4 GB RAM
Cheers for that, could be a short-term intervention for it.
Good to see you
Very kind offer, I'll consider that but would always prefer to pay the going rate - we're the charity, not you 
Realistically, I just need to throw a strop at the charity to sort things out once and for all, instead of sellotaping fixes together - completely agree @rcy026
Been very close to offering to rebuild the entire thing for them from scratch, but alas, I'd fully become responsible for all of it which is equally an unpleasant thought. Small guide written to un-fuck elementor when things crash, and a note to say that it's a feature of the current website, not a bug.
Cheers for the sense check, everyone, pretty much what I had envisioned but seeing it repeated back helps.