Does anyone know of any free servers that do a reasonable job of hosting a simple Drupal site? I know of Heliohost but after trying it I found it to be very slow (you get what you pay for clearly), but based on your experience are there any suggestions?
You have to choose either free or Drupal, as it is Ram-greedy beast, you cannot feed it with free social sandwiches.
However, you can try cheap hosting plans, few years ago I used to host about 20 small Drupal sites on a $50/year account.
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As a frontend engineer and where the freelance market seems to be, I'd like to dig into some WordPress stuff and build one for myself to at least know how to play around with it. And soon later I'll dig into backend and probably would deploy a dynamic website.
I'd like to find an option for a way that could host both, and also I can learn and develop more in such hosting method.
I tried heroku but its policy changed so the current way I forked on GitHub wouldn't be available soon. I cancelled bluehost subscription cause I believe it's not gonna be suitable for future deployment with dynamic website.
I've seen aws but its services are too many that I have no where to start with.
I'm so confused with all hosting options and iaas paas saas even tho I tired to read articles to understand them. Plus information online is like crazy a lot so that I have no idea which should I start with.
I am fine with paid service,
Could anyone share some experience with me?
If you are just getting started with web hosting you should use firebase hosting (You can't host Wordpress sites in firebase). It is completely free for hosting and also has a free database. You can deploy react.js apps or basic html,css,js websites in firebase. If you are using next.js you can check out Vercel. After exploring all of these you should try to get into the fun stuff such as Hostinger, WP Engine, DigitalOcean which support wordpress, static sites and dynamic sites.
I am not an experienced engineer like you are, but I have used these and trust me they are worth it. I hope this answer helps you
So, I have an instance created at Google Cloud Platform, with Bitnami WordPress installed, and my website got hacked...again. I migrated a few months ago from my hosting to GCP, thinking it will be safer, because my website got hacked before, probably by my competitors, because I have several more websites and only this one gets hacked. But the migration didn't help. I thought Google took security more seriously. I don't know if the instance got hacked, or WordPress, or something else. So, what can I do to prevent this?
Security of your VM, OS, and WordPress are your responsibility.
There are a zillion ways to get hacked. Your question has no details on how your systems are configured, what hack occurred, etc.
The Internet has many tutorials on securing Linux, securing WordPress, securing Google Cloud. YouTube also has good resources to learn from. Invest the time to learn how security works and how to protect yourself.
Regarding your competitors hacking you - maybe if they are naive or unethical. In general, it is often easy to figure out who did what, when, and from where. The experts that know how to cover their tracks won't target your site as there are no financial or bragging rights. Most likely a script kiddie found an easy target.
Didn't find a similar question here on SO. There's an old, closed question (2011) on WordPress SE, where page.ly (not free, premium service, hundreds of dollars a month) and WPEngine (also not free, plans start from $25/mo) are mentioned. Any other, free alternatives?
I use Google Cloud to host WordPress, and their Always Free Tier Compute Engine Instance is enough for a small personal site.
It is a little bit more complicated to setup than WPEngine, but the easiest way to host WordPress on Google Cloud is to use a prebuilt image from the Google Cloud Marketplace. I use images created by Bitnami, such as this one: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/bitnami-launchpad/wordpress
On the Configuration page, you will need to adjust the machine size to be "Micro" and make sure the Region is one of the regions mentioned on the Free Tier page.
The estimated cost will say something like $5.13, but if you have everything configured in a way that matches up with the Compute Engine section of the Free Tier page, it will show up on your bill at $0. Of course there are other things Google Cloud may charge you for, such as if you go over the 1GB data transfer limit, but even so your hosting could be pretty inexpensive if your site is not too busy.
I'm migrating to an ecommerce platform that would help me sell my products online to a wider user base. I am told Shopify/Zepo is an online shop for small businesses and Magento/woocommerce are solutions. What exactly is the difference between a "shop" and "solution"? Or what if I build a site from scratch? Where do I start from?
Shopify/Zepo are SaaS ecommerce platforms which can handle milions of visits/transactions per day if your store is a real success.
Magento/woocommerce are 'own hosted' tools/platforms.
Both are ok to start with, but if you think you'll do good, be careful on the last ones. They might seem cheap at the beginning but they can eventually ruin your business.
When starting it's always wiser to start with a SaaS tool which has no upfront costs and allow you to download all your data (products, customers, orders) in case you want to move to another platform.
Starting with Magento or WooCommerce will force you to have a sys team or a web developer almost permanently doing server-packages updates and so, let alone security, performance and scalability issues.
I do not believe using an off-the-shelf SAAS alone will ever be enough for a successful ecommerce website.
If you want to have a successful ecommerce solution you will need at least a good web developer to keep your site up-to-date.
Moreover, there will be many opportunities such as integration with your back-end systems that an off-the-shelf SAAS might not be able to handle.
My advice is to find a good technical resource, even if it's just one web developer, and build your product together - invariably it's more about people than technology or platform.
So, I've been setting my sights on MS Azure for quite awhile as my top hosting choice. I have a trial account and since I am still in the development phase of my ASP project, I wouldn't want to have to spent a cent yet.
However after a month, the issue of how I am going to host my website came into mind. I haven't tried Azure yet, however assuming I want to host it privately or using a VPS to save costs, how exactly do I transition my project for hosting?
Azure has a toolkit which handles the uploading and whatnot for me, however if I engage in VPS services, how do I set-up my website and will the cost difference be something worth looking at?
A lot depends on what your needs are. "Hosting an ASP.Net website" covers a pretty broad spectrum from a simple one-page site that no one but you and a couple friends look at to a complex and highly trafficked site like StackOverflow. Telling you what you need to do to host your site is impossible without more details. However, to get you started with some basic information so that you can ask a better question I recommend you start with this page, scroll down to the paragraphs labelled "Web Sites" and "Cloud Services".