Choosing a web hosting at the end of 2022

The Problem

I hosted my projects at Dreamhost (and I'll not provide the link on purpose), so I was quite happy with the service and paid 100-120 USD yearly, which included two domains and shared web hosting. But then I encountered this:

My current hosting plan

Why's that? Why do I have to pay 156 USD for the same service? It's not about inflation, for sure. Well, the answer was on the front page of the same hosting provider – hosting plans for the new customers:

New hosting plan offerings

So, new customers pay 36 USD for the same service and they can do it monthly! Who's paying for that? Old loyal customers like me! And it's the same for the other providers, so I had to find a real alternative.

The Alternatives

So, I found the following alternatives:

Technically, you also need domain hosting to park your domains somewhere and point to your actual hosting, and Cloudflare or Google Domains offer this service.

But let's first look at the requirements.

The Requirements

I had some sites requiring PHP and SQL databases, but I doubted whether I needed these sites. Ok, what would happen if I stop them? How many people were using them? The answers were "nothing" and "two" accordingly, so I decided to back up one website and send the backup to another user.

So, static websites were quite sufficient for my needs, but is that all about requirements? Well, I got used to updating my websites using git, so...

The Solution

You can host dynamic and static websites using cloud services. The drawback? You have to install the operating system and software yourself, configure it and protect it against attacks, and so on.

With static hostings, you can host static pages only, but it's free, and they manage all the operating system/web server/security issues themselves.

I had one particular question, which made me choose GitHub over Cloudflare for pages hosting: how do I host several websites for different domains? GitHub docs got this topic covered, but I didn't find the answer in Cloudflare Pages' docs.

And I also chose Cloudflare for DNS hosting as it's free for personal use.

So, the transit was the following:

  1. Move domains to Cloudflare
  2. Move pages to GitHub
  3. Connect pages on GitHub and domains at Cloudflare

That's all. I paid some fees for domain transfer, and I also had to pay for my domains for another year, but that's a lot less than 156 USD. The timeframe was tight, so my plan B was to pay for another month and finish this procedure. Technically domain transfer takes some time, but all went well, and – bye, shared web hosting!

P.S.

And Dreamhost also charged me an additional 17 USD for domain registration. Yes, it was in the contract.

Doiman fee