Shared hosting today is cheap, every month there is an excuse to offer discount coupons, and incentives to get you to open an account and have your own domain and website up and running within minutes.
The GUI, usually driven by CPanel, is very easy to use, even for the uninitiated (less geeky) amongst us. You can setup DNS pointers using a very user friendly GUI, and most of the time you never have to touch these (or even know what they mean or do for that mater), since they are created for you, but if you do need to do any changes, say because you have a paid gmail account, and you want your mail server to point there, this can be done with a few clicks of the mouse, and with tons of s tutorials on what to do step by step, usually offered by the hosting provider itself.
Support is usually hit and miss, I have had support phone calls answered within a minute or two, and I have also had calls on hold for over 30 minutes. The online chat is more or less the same.
All in all, considering the costs involved in setting up a shared hosting account, and knowing what is going on behind the scenes, I would definitely recommend a shared hosting account to anyone who needs to setup a blog, or website but who is not a geeky hands on guy.
However, if on the other hand, you are a tech savvy guy, who has installed linux a few times, and someone who knows all about apache, virtual hosts, dns and mysql or mariadb, then I cannot not recommend going for VPS hosting. But VPS is expensive, or is it ?
I was reading a flipboard article a couple of months back, when an advert came up about time4vps, I briefly looked at the advert, and dismissed it immediately as the prices were simply too good to be true. Later that week, the advert came up again (damn you cookies), and out of curiosity, I did some research on their services.
Most if not all the reviews I have found were very positive, but still i refrained, it would be a very big hassle to transfer the websites, and all their databases from my current hosting provider to a VPS server, not to mention there would probably be down time. The only positive aspect would be that I would be able to run all my websites using the https format. Something which is a big no – no with my current hosting provider.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, I was nursing a very bad cold and a chest infection. I was confined to barracks for 5 days. I was cleaning up and organising by browser bookmarks (no Maria, that is not OCD), and I came across a bookmark I had added to time4vps. I just took the plunge. Created an account, paid via paypal, and within a few seconds I received an SMS with a verification code, along with a call with the same verification code. I also received an email with a second verification code. It was done.
I logged in to my control panel, chose my operating system (Centos 7) and waited as instructed for about 10 minutes for the installation to complete. After that I was presented with an option to login via a console window using a generated root password, and that was it. All that remained was to install and configure the server whichever way I liked, but more about that in the next blog post.
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