Hi all,

Seeking advice on selecting hosting plans

My current hosting plan shall expire on mid April, 2021. I'm now negotiating with my current hosting company as well as seeking information from other companies.

Number of running websites - 38 all WordPress websites, shared hosting
All my websites are NOT for business, but only sharing information amongst friends and acquaintence. Traffic is NOT heavy
Disk Usage - about 75G (current plan with unlimited space)
Inodes - about 150k
etc.

A hosting company suggests me turning to a Reseller Plan but it is with limited space, not unlimited space.

I expect to know what is the difference between WordPress Hosting Plan and Reseller Plan. Cost of monthly subscription is NOT my 1st consideration.

Please advise.

Thanks and Regards

Those are just names - they can mean whatever any hosting company wants them to mean.

A WordPress plan might be a single pre-installed WordPress instance, it could simply be saying "we have the relevant dependencies installed", or perhaps it means something else.

Generally, a "reseller" plan is targetted at people who will be re-selling hosting onto multiple other parties - they would thus come with account creation/management facilities, as well as the additional disk space and bandwidth needed to provide hosting to multiple others.


That is a very significant amount of usage, and is the reason they're pushing you towards their reseller plan.

Your current hosting does not really have unlimited space - it cannot exceed that provided by the hard-drives installed, which is limited by physical space, power, etc.

What sort of data are you storing to use that amount, and what is its rate of increase?

Hi,

Thanks for your advice.

I haven't contacted my current hosting company yet. My current plan shall expire in mid April, 2021. I am just collecting information before negotiating a new contract.

My only dis-satisfaction with my current hosting company are;
1. They have very poor technical support on WordPress, frequently advising me to subscribe their paid technical support on WordPress
2. Sometime it takes a long time connecting my websites on browser.

Actually all my WordPress websites are for sharing technical information amongst friends only with low hitting but not for business. I have cloned websites on local network but my PC are not running 24/7/365 therefore I still need the online websites.

Just checked the Statistic on cPanel and I have the screenshots attached here;
Physical Memory Usage - 120.95 MB / 1 GB (11.81%)
File Usage - 2,636 / ∞
(I think it refers to inodes, the number of files upload)
etc.

What is ∞ referring to? Infinitive?
What is I/O Usage? Already 94.04%

Please advise giving me your suggestion to negotiate a new plan with my current hosting company

Thanks and regards

Attached Thumbnails

         

The questions to ask yourself is what are you currently using your websites for and the minimum requirements needed then plan to future growth if necessary. Unless you are going to be running a fully operational drop shipping website you really don't need much to keep you going. You mentioned 38 website so will will definitely need to have adequate SQL databases.

Personally I have stayed away from Wordpress hosting and rather opted to have a basic hosting space (depending on your needs) with cPanel and install Wordpress myself. I found I have more control over the back-end in some instances.

There are plenty of hosting providers that offer the same or similar options. In my case I would see if there is a hosting provider locally in my country or alternatively opt for a respected provider.

The amount spent will also be a factor, most hosting providers will charge you for all the bells and whistles and you may find yourself not even using a fraction of those features.

If you are not going to be reselling rather steer clear of the reseller plans as they tend to be a bit on the higher price side and if you are not selling you wont be recouping the money back.

As already mentioned on my 1st posting, my 38 websites are NOT for business, only sharing information to friends. It can be said as only for fun.

I came across Reseller Plan only on shopping for information from other hosting companies. Actually I need to make preparation before negotiating a new contract with my current hosting companies.

I have cloned websites on local network running without problem. My PC is NOT running 24/7/365 therefore I need a hosting company running my websites. Years ago I setup the network in following way;
The switching is fully automatic and seamless. Visitors don't recognize the change on switching. My current plan is provided with this feature. After stopping subscribing Static IP I ceased running this feature. Yes, I can continue running this operation on Dynamic IP but I consider it NOT necessary.

On the screenshot it shows I/O Usage (in RED), already 94.04%. I have no idea what it is? Maybe I'll contact my hosting company to find out.

Regards

The following article may elaborate a bit regarding your I/O usage, your hosting provider may have their own explanation.- https://www.milesweb.com/hosting-faq...ocesses-limit/

In my personal view if the system is not broke don't try and change or fix it, unless there is a specific reason to do so and since money is not your 1st consideration as you stated, I don't see a reason to change the current system.

It appears know what your doing and talking about so I would assume their support does not concern you? Therefore its a win on your side.

Regarding your questions about the difference between the 2 plans I am sure @boughtonp answered the question for you?

Regarding the slow response times on your browser, have a look and see if you hosting space is running on SSD hard drives as some companies use this as a sales pitch to ensure their customers faster speeds and response time. Also keep in mind if this is happening on your side only or if it does the same on other machines and networks.

All the best!

My understanding is that reseller hosting plans are designed for person who wish to act as "hosting providers" but do not have physical servers of their own, so they rent space from a larger hosting provider, then turn around and use it to provision their customers.

Here's a fairly clear explanation from a commercial hosting provider: https://www.hostgator.in/blog/hostin...eller-hosting/

Hi frankbell,

Thanks for your advice and link

All hosting companies contacted by me, in this search, tried selling me their Reseller Plans. I have informed them that I have cloned websites running on local network and all my websites are NOT for business purpose. Actually it is quite easy for me turning my PC to an Internet server, provided if I'm willing running it 24/7/365, even without Static/Fixed IP.

Most likely I'll continue using the service of my current hosting company, even though I'm NOT quite satisfied on their service. The ONLY reason is saving trouble on migrating my websites to a new hosting company as well as time. I have no technical problem on websites migration but ONLY avoiding mistake in migration in case.

On renewal my hosting plan, my current hosting company will charge me normal fee, not that listed on their website. All plans listed on their websites are for new purchase. My solution to breakthrough is to buy a new service plan with another domain. I have 5 domains registered and hosted on their server. I did it 3 years ago and it works. The only problem is all my current webmails will lose as well as I have to do some minor work on moving my websites to the new hosting plan.
I'll contact my current hosting company to see what will happen.

Regards

Hi Gad,

Thanks for your advice and link.

I agree with your comment. But I have to solve the trick played by my current hosting company;please see my late reply to frankbell for detail.

The technical support of my current hosting company on WordPress website are very poor. In an incident, happened about 2 years ago, some of my websites unable to work after upgrade as advised. I haven't made any changes on them. Their technical support couldn't help me. Finally I have to re-install their WordPress leaving only wp-content folder and wp-config.php It took me quite some time to finish fixing the problem.

I referred to the websites running on the server of my current hosting company. All websites running on local network work extremely fast and without problem.

In respect of I/O usage, marked red, I'll talk to the technical support of my current hosting company. According to my recollection they have contacted me several years ago, pushing me to purchase more resource.

My current plan:
Shared Hosting
Unlimited storage space
Unlimited websites
Unlimited visits
Limited inodes (number of files upload) - It is far below their limit
etc.

Regards

I think its quite common for hosting providers to turn around and pass the buck back to their customers when things go wrong. I like the fact that the link for Hostgator was supplied by @frankbell, in my personal experience with them they do appear to be very helpful and accommodating as much as possible, but that was just my experience with them. Their pricing is not bad either and have one of the more decent data centers around. Godaddy is another decent option but also just my personal opinion.

Wishing you all the best!

Hi all,

Thanks for your reply and time.

It is NOW clear to me that I should continue subscribing Shared Hosting Plan.

Before I have a wrong concept that all my websites are WordPress sites. WordPress Hosting Plan would be more suitable to me. I don't need their support on WordPress. Sorry.

Regards

You welcome, glad if we were able to to help in any way

Hi Gad,

An additional question in respect of I/O Usage;
A week ago, once I found in RED saying 94.01% usage under Statistics. I/O usage refers to the Transfer Rate between hard disk and RAM. In renewing the contract whether I need to subscribe more RAM?

Thanks and Regards

Good question, I am not 100% sure to be honest. I don't pick up anything out of the ordinary regarding your server resources, disk / ram / etc... however on the 1st attachment is says 71,482.61MB which is just under 70GB if I am not mistaken. I would assume everything is running on the same server. Its quite a chunk I think but could be wrong.

Enterprise networks would probably run the database and front end on separate servers and then pull only requested data once selected. Could be one of the reasons, also the webhost themselves could just have below par servers to be honest but this is just me thinking out loud.

I think maybe ask them the question on how you can reduce the I/O usage and see what they say. I don't believe in throwing more money at an issue but in some cases it is necessary

Perhaps you could also weigh out the cost of using shared hosting vs VPS hosting as shared hosting you are sharing the server with multiple customers