Geek Build Steering Committee Decision — Web Hosting Recommendation
The steering committee has discussed the web hosting question amongst ourselves and made a final decision. Well, STRONG recommendation is a better term since we can’t mandate that participants switch their web hosting provider.
Our recommendation is that all site participants put their primary website on wpengine.com ($29/month) and any ancillary sites on Hostgator (as low as $6.36/month unlimited).
The steering committee chose wpengine as a result of their price (recently dropped from $49 to $29 per month), caching, WordPress expertise, and support.
WPEngine.com signup: http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=394686&u=624599&m=41388&urllink=&afftrack= (affiliate link)
All Geek Build participants should switch off their current hosts and over to WPEngine. If you need help moving your site over, shoot me an email and I can point you in the right direction.
Next up for Geek Build 2012? A decision on a recommended IDX provider. This decision needs lots of thought and is the most critical decision to be made, so please leave your feedback here.
Note from the Editor: Not sure what Geek Build 2012 is? It’s building a few real estate websites from scratch publicly with the help of the Geek Estate Community and overseen by an experienced steering committee. Read more about Geek Build 2012 here, or view all posts related to Geek Build 2012 here.
**Geek Build logo designed by Dominic Morrocco at M Squared Real Estate.
Mike McGee
Posted at 05:59h, 16 MarchI looked into wpengine, but the 15GB monthly transfer limit is infinitesimally small. Our site is not that huge, yet our monthly bandwidth is several orders of magnitude larger than that. (And that’s with using CloudFlare, too, which saves a lot of server bandwidth.) We went with KnownHost, which has great managed VPS hosting for surprisingly low price.
Greg Fischer
Posted at 13:48h, 16 MarchMike, any feedback on how Diverse is doing with your site/content?
Mike McGee
Posted at 14:04h, 19 MarchHi Greg, I’ve been pretty happy with DS. I’m always looking at other IDX options as well, but so far nothing has compelled me to switch away from DS. I like the usability, aesthetics, and bottom-line, the lead generation.
Jason Cohen
Posted at 13:21h, 19 MarchHi this is Jason from WP Engine. I looked at your blog and I don’t think you’re using that much transfer. Maybe there’s a GB/MB confusion going on?
So few of our customers hit those limits that we’ve actually discussed just getting rid of them. Your site doesn’t seem to be an exception, so I’m curious…
Mike McGee
Posted at 20:52h, 19 MarchHere’s a link to my bandwidth log from last month.
https://img.skitch.com/20120319-rpgtxai6c7m32khhuef1gt9a7n.jpg
It shows 280.51 Gig. I also exceed the monthly visitors for your base plan.
Greg Fischer
Posted at 13:53h, 16 MarchI’m going to do this for the main site this weekend or early next week. I’ll give some feedback once it’s complete. Keeping my hyper-local and test sites with Host Gator.
(Who by the way – has phone and live chatted with me for hours. pretty remarkable, they are pretty good in that aspect. – note – every time I had an issue, I created it, by messing too much with CSS, and functions.php)
Jason Cohen
Posted at 07:06h, 20 MarchI can’t tell from that screenshot, but typically those are gigaBITS and not gigaBYTES, so in fact you’d be fine.
Mike McGee
Posted at 10:16h, 21 MarchThe screenshot is from cPanel. Documentation seems to indicate it’s bytes: http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/11_30/WHMDocs/BandwidthDiscrepancies#How%20cPanel%20%20WHM%20measures%20bandwid
Also, my monthly visitors far exceeds the allotment stated for your base plan. There’s big difference between $29 and $99/month, and the fear is one migrates their site to a new host and then is later told they must upgrade to a higher plan to handle the traffic. Been there, done that.