Hello. First off, thanks to Craig for his videos, they have been a Godsend
Backstory: We have a M1 CE website hosted by Siteground, last week I installed and have configured a Magento 2.3.2 open source site that is currently being hosted alongside our existing one. Our current site gets approx. 5000-6000 visits per month on average. We are currently paying nearly 400 GBP per year for them to host our site on their highest shared server package.
I have run in to an issue with them today. I have been investigating the whole MySQL Search deprecation thing today, and unfortunately Siteground do not support Elasticsearch on their shared servers, only their dedicated servers, and their prices for that start at ÂŁ195 p/m, far beyond what we are able to pay as a small business. I am after recommendation of a replacement that offer a similar feature set and level of support, which has been A1, hopefully around the same cost as what we are currently paying.
Kudos for doing your due diligence and learning about the MySQL search deprecation. I recently pencilled together some instructions on how to install Elasticsearch for a video. However, the Oracle Java License had a huge update and now âtechnicallyâ you canât use their JDK without paying for it - Which is a requirement of Elasticsearch, so the video never happened. Anyway, I digressâŚ
5000-6000 monthly visits probably doesnât warrant going with a Managed Dedicated Server, so I wonât talk about that any further. So, the thing is with Managed Shared Servers is that theyâre incredibly cheap and easy for Web Hosts to run and maintain because they have a âcookie cutterâ model. They all have these âglass ceilingsâ in place where their customers canât modify a whole bunch because it makes it super-easy for their engineers to maintain.
If youâre running a Wordpress site or something similar it really doesnât matter. But when you work with more complex CMS applications like Magento, you quickly find yourself running into hurdles. Therefore, Managed Shared Servers are generally very cheap.
Then you have your Managed/Unmanaged Cloud Servers (kind of the middle ground between Managed Shared and Managed Dedicated Servers). These are typically what I try to push most people towards as the setups allow for much more flexibility but donât come with as much âA1 supportâ (at budget price levels) because each server is bespoke and comes with their own unique challenges.
Having said that (and I can already hear myself sounding like a cheap shill), I recently did a review on Cloudways. Essentially, youâll probably find a similar experience as youâve had with Siteground but with a little more flexibility of what you need at only a slightly higher price. My review video will give you a better idea of what I experienced: Cloudways Review: 30 days undercover as a customer (Magento 2 Managed Hosting).
I donât think youâll find anything else comparable in both price and service to Siteground that gives you the flexibility and support youâre after without spending much more than you do now.
Hopefully, this response helps shed some sort of light. Iâll be glad to go into more detail if you have any specific questions.
Thanks for your reply. Prior to your message, I had been looking at alternative site hosting options meeting my requirements and I had looked at Cloudways, so your recommendation swayed me to go with them. I have requested a migration of our new site from Siteground to them, and I will reply back with an update when itâs happened.
So 2 weeks in, and website is migrated and mostly fully functional running on Cloudways. Cloudways support was a bit of a mixed bag; they would tell me how to do things, but not do them themselves. As a new customer less than a day in, I did need their assistance quite a bit and felt they could have been a bit more helpful to a new customer getting used to their systems and admin panels etc.
There ticket support staff are more helpful sometimes than their live chat agents; to be expected I suppose, Iâm presuming the live chat staff have to serve x amount of clients per hour.
Thank you for coming back with your feedback. I hadnât really thought about it before, but youâre right that the Ticket Service seemed better - Probably because they arenât feeling so rushedâŚ
Hello @doctor . Because the site hasnât gone live and is still in development, I canât comment on certain things, butâŚ
how much you are paying for it ( and the configuration) and if you think its worth the money.
Weâre now on the $80 package, we were on the $42 package, but as the site has developed with additional features, extensions and functionality, the 4GB RAM wasnât enough for basic Magento functions, installing updates etc. The site does feel faster though. Because Cloudways were recommended by @digitalstartup Craig, I didnât really spend much time comparing the pricing elsewhere, but personally I canât imagine that the prices are going to differ substantially.
If they allow customisation of source code for developers to work on the site?
Not too sure what you mean here, they donât have any involvement within Magento, so you can do whatever you like with it. They set it up to start off with, and then itâs yours.
Which platform( AWS/DO/Linodeetc) are you hosting it on and can u chose to move independent ( migrate to self hosted / cloud )
DigitalOcean. Pass on the second part, havenât investigated this as Iâve no need to.
Is the eleasticsearch server hosted on a different instance?
No. This was one of the main reasons for moving to Cloudways; they support ElasticSearch out of the box, itâs literally just turning it on within your cloudways dashboard and configuring Magento to use it. (We purchased Mirasvitâs module).
Would you still shift to cloudways if you had a choice?
Yes. Ultimately we had to move from Siteground as they donât allow root server access for installing the ElasticSearch engine, unless youâre on one their cloud-based packages. Also, even though we were on their GoGeek package, itâs still sharing resources, which at peak trading times was causing us issues with our old site using more than they deem acceptable.
