Which hosting to choose

Shared hosting, VPS, cloud

• Shared hosting: your site is one of many on a server the provider runs. A control panel, PHP, MySQL and mail are ready, updates are the provider's job. Cheapest and simplest; you cannot install system software or run a container.
• VPS: a virtual server of your own, with root access. You install and update everything yourself, from the web server to the firewall. See VPS hosting.
• Cloud platforms: servers, databases and storage billed by use, which grow with the load. More flexible and more to learn.

A blog, a business card site or a WordPress shop fits shared hosting. So does more than PHP: Beget's basic shared plan runs Flask and Django applications through Passenger, and Beget also lists Node.js among the supported languages. How each host behaves inside: Beget and DreamHost.

Apps on shared hosting

A Python application is not a reason to buy a VPS by itself: Beget runs Flask and Django on its basic virtual hosting through Passenger. The site root holds a passenger_wsgi.py, and .htaccess switches Passenger on and names the Python interpreter. The steps, including the build of Python into ~/.local, are in Beget shared hosting: Python on the basic plan; the guides are Configure Flask on virtual hosting and Installing Django on a virtual hosting.

PassengerEnabled On PassengerPython /home/u/user/.local/bin/python3

What really needs a VPS, then:

• Docker or another container runtime, and anything that ships as an image;
• a process that runs all the time: a bot, a queue worker, a WebSocket server;
• system packages, a daemon or a database the plan does not provide;
• root access, your own web server configuration, or a port other than 80 and 443;
• guaranteed memory and CPU, or a traffic volume a shared plan does not allow.

Node.js is available on shared hosting as far as the providers document it: Beget lists Node.js among its supported languages. DreamHost offers it on Managed VPS and Dedicated servers, not on shared hosting, as its supported technologies page says.

To test the site against the web layer of either host before you pay, run the hosting-like Docker images. The rules that break during a move are collected in Creating rules in .htaccess.

What to look at

• Support: how fast and how competently it answers. Ask a technical question before you buy.
• What runs there: the PHP versions, Python, databases, SSH access, cron jobs.
• Backups: how often, how long they are kept, and whether you can restore one yourself.
• Where the servers are: close to your visitors means faster pages.
• The price of the second year: the first is often discounted.
• Mail on your domain, free HTTPS certificates, and how many sites one plan takes.
• A way out: can you download all files and databases at any time.

The Russian market

statonline.ru counts which providers host the domains of the .ru zone. The twenty largest in May 2020:

In December 2018 REG.RU was first with 284,010 domains (14.48%), Beget second with 245,893 (12.53%) and TIMEWEB third with 184,951 (9.43%). The current figures are on statonline.ru.

Mail on your own domain

A good provider lets you create addresses such as info@example.com for your site, see Beget mail: create a mailbox. You can read that mail three ways:

• in the webmail of the provider: nothing to set up, but you have to log in there;
• in a mail service you already use, which collects or receives the mail, see Yandex Mail: collect mail from other mailboxes;
• in a mail program such as Mozilla Thunderbird, over IMAP and SMTP.

Thunderbird usually finds the servers by itself. For a Beget mailbox in 2020 it found IMAP at imap.beget.ru, port 143 with STARTTLS, and SMTP at smtp.beget.ru, port 465 with SSL/TLS:

After Done the mailbox is in Thunderbird with its folders:

Check who owns your domain

Beginners often order hosting and a domain in one go from the first provider they find. If that provider is an accredited registrar, the domain is registered to you directly. Often, though, the provider only resells, registering the domain through a real registrar for a fee, and then it is worth checking that the domain is registered to you and not to the provider. How: Moving a website: domain and hosting.

Ready to change provider? The step-by-step guide, from copying the files over SSH to switching DNS and closing the old account, is Moving a site to another hosting.

Article authors: Andrei Olegovich, Klavdiya Kondakova