Renewal of hosting

[Laird]

As many of you already know:

1. Psience Quest is currently being hosted by Hostgator on my shared-server hosting account which supports the hosting of "unlimited" domains, and on which I host three other unrelated domains.
   
2. About a year ago, for several months the shared server on which PQ is hosted was affected by a database overuse issue which caused major availability issues for PQ members, as discussed in the threads SQL Error: 1040 - Too many connections and forum slow in responding.
   
3. Since that time, that database overuse issue has occurred only a handful of isolated times, and seems for all intents and purposes to have been resolved.
   
4. Psience Quest accepts donations, and our current financial position based on expenses and donations to date is positive (savings), at USD 185.23.
   
5. Because I host three other domains on my unlimited-domain Hostgator shared-server hosting account, Psience Quest is only (held) responsible (for) a quarter of the costs that I pay for hosting.
   

Now, renewal of this Hostgator hosting account of mine is due by the 22nd of this month (January 2020). They propose to bill me for another 2 years of hosting at USD 10.95 per month plus 10% tax = USD 12.045 per month, or a total of USD 289.08 for the full 24 months, 25% of which Psience Quest would be responsible for, or USD 72.27.

It is possible to renew for shorter periods, including 1 year, 6 months, 3 months, and 1 month, all of which are charged at the slightly higher rate of USD 11.95 per month plus 10% tax = USD 13.145. Psience Quest would be responsible for a quarter of that, at USD 3.29 per month.

My thoughts at this stage in relation to all of this are:

1. Given that the database unavailability issue seems mostly to have been resolved, migration to another host is not urgent, if it is even worth it at all (although we could move to a Linux VPS on the IO Zoom host for only USD 8 per month of which Psience Quest would be responsible for only USD 2 - whether or not that includes tax I am not sure).
   
2. I am unlikely anyway to have the drive to migrate us to another host before 22 January.
   
3. Nevertheless, it is best to keep our options open, and thus to pay the slightly higher monthly fee and, going forward, simply pay one month in advance at a time just in case we do decide to migrate to another host.
   

So, that's what I plan on doing unless anybody has any better ideas of which they can convince us: pay one month at a time to Hostgator going forward, of which USD 3.29 per month will come out of funds donated to Psience Quest, to keep open the possibility of us migrating to another host. Feel free to share your thoughts on this.

No disagreement here.

A question though. What would be the reason(s) at this stage for moving to another provider?

• technical issues
  
• support/service
  
• cost
  
• other
  

I can understand cost always being a motivation. But given the technical problems seem to have calmed down, are there other reasons to move?

[Ninshub]

I don't feel the need for prudence as much given how well it's been going and so it would make more sense to me to pay for a year's worth, for instance, but whatever everyone prefers is fine with me. Thanks for keeping on top and taking care of this, Laird.

Trust you guys to do what's best.

Let us know if there's a need for more donations.

thanks,

Sci

[Laird]

No disagreement here.

A question though. What would be the reason(s) at this stage for moving to another provider?

• technical issues
  
• support/service
  
• cost
  
• other
  

I can understand cost always being a motivation. But given the technical problems seem to have calmed down, are there other reasons to move?

Cost would be one motivation.

Another would be greater control: we would be admins of the entire (virtual) server, so would for the most part be able to fix our own technical problems rather than have to go through Hostgator support.

Another advantage of this is finer-grained permissions, so that, for example, I would be able to give FTP access to those who wanted to help maintain the site without worrying that they would then be able to see in the code the master password for my Hostgator account, which is the same for everything: instead, they would simply see the database password for the specific database user which accesses our PQ database, which would be unique and would give them no further access.

And yet another is that we would be able to install technologies which we are unable to install on our shared Hostgator server, such as PHP caching, which caches both scripts (so that they don't have to be parsed and recompiled-on-the-fly each time they are accessed), as well as providing an object cache for, e.g., MediaWiki, which we use for our wiki. This potentially would speed up our site a little.

And then, of course, having a guaranteed amount of resources allocated specifically to our (virtual) server would eliminate the possibility of the sort of resource contention issues which we have experienced: though we are no longer experiencing them, we have no guarantee that they won't happen again.

None of this is game-changing, I don't think (which is why I'm not rushing to migrate), just "nice-to-haves".

[Laird]

I don't feel the need for prudence as much given how well it's been going and so it would make more sense to me to pay for a year's worth, for instance, but whatever everyone prefers is fine with me. Thanks for keeping on top and taking care of this, Laird.

How about we compromise and go for six months?

[Laird]

How about we compromise and go for six months?

A little cheekily, rather than waiting for a response, I went ahead with this. Our hosting is now paid up until 22 July 2020. Will add the details to our financials spreadsheet shortly.

Thanks Laird, I can see there are positive reasons for moving. Thanks also for sorting out the current payment situation.

[Ninshub]

How about we compromise and go for six months?

Sorry for the delay in answering. I would have been fine with less too, whatever works for everyone. In any case, thanks for handling all of this.

I use Hostgator for three sites. It makes me crazy trying to keep up with how I am supposed to access Billing but the technical help has always been very good. (Never try using their messenger help. I think it is just a pacifier.)

I also had a MyBB board, but recently broke it trying to upgrade, so moved to WordPress WP Foro (http://coop.ethericstudies.org/).  I am impressed as to how well [url=https://psiencequest.net/][/url]Psience Quest is operated. Thanks!

My rule is to keep things as simple as possible. At 76, it is prudent for me to make sure others can pick up the pieces and move on if I do not come home from a vacation. MyBB did not fill that requirement. Hostgator has for years.

My guess is that, like me, you are currently a single point of failure. It all comes down to what you want. 

For me, I appreciate the article posts and would miss them. It is difficult to find an aggregator that allows discussion rather than hundreds of inane wisecracks.