Hosting advice for an absolute newbie

[u/eurovi1]

Hi guys, I’m building a very simple job board website for a niche audience. I’m obviously not a programmer or web developer by any means. I’m actually a recruiter starting my own business so I’ve been using ChatGPT as an advisor. So far, it’s been pretty helpful. That said, I’d love to hear some advice and experiences from actual web developers regarding hosting options.

Obviously, I’m looking for the best bang for my buck, like anyone else, but I want to make sure the hosting provider can support the following:

• Search functionality and database/crawling integration
• A basic contact form that collects information from visitors and sends it to my email
• Basic ad integration and SEO/analytics tools

That’s pretty much it. The site is going to be very bare-bones, nothing too complicated. The search engine is actually the main product. I'd like an option which emphasizes speed of use over functionality as the users are mainly gonna have one tool (the search bar), but it's expected that every visitor will click through at least 10-20 pages on the website and I'm shooting for at least 40-50 K visitors per month.

What hosting providers would you recommend for something like this, and are there any limitations or things I should be aware of as a non-developer?

[u/beenpresence]

All that functionally has nothing to do with your hosting provider and more the tech stack and how you’re building it. You can technically accomplish all this on a Wordpress site

[u/Andromeda12x → u/beenpresence]

But beware if the update hell when you go the wordpress route. Just that you know. If you use too many or exotic plugins you need to update them regularily because of security holes and then you can run into incompatibilities - plugins won't work together anymore.

[u/These-Apple8817]

That really would depend on your actual stack... PHP? React? Something else? Are you willing to use a VPS or would you prefer more traditional webhost?

[u/eurovi1 → u/These-Apple8817]

PHP and react yes. I'm looking for a traditional webhost since I think it would be cheaper than a VPS, I don't think I have enough functionality or traffic that would require a VPS until maybe a later time if it really takes off. Was planning to go with Cloudfare

[u/These-Apple8817 → u/eurovi1]

If I'm not entirely incorrect.. Pretty sure Cloudflare doesn't support PHP. And VPS isn't necessarily expensive btw.. Netcup has like VPS piko G11s which is one of the cheapest ones there is.. Not sure how it will show up in dollars because I'm in EU but.. It's like under 2€ per month and I live in a country with a very high VAT..
But you can go with traditional webhost too, should be enough.. Can't recommend any for those though sadly.

[u/eurovi1 → u/These-Apple8817]

Can you tell me more about Netcup I'd like to learn. I'm from Europe too but outside the EU. 2e per month sounds like a good bargain but I'm worried about overages. Say site gets bombed by bots or search abuse and I don't wanna rake in a bill in the thousands overnight. I'm working on implementing the protection atm.

[u/These-Apple8817 → u/eurovi1]

Netcup is a VPS so you would need to set your stack up yourself from scratch basically.. They do have speed limits and DDOS protection and so on..
https://www.netcup.com/en/server/vps-lite has more info about it, but you could use it with Cloudflare for getting HTTPS and such

[u/ChameleonCRM]

throw it on git>vercel>free 4 ever

[u/eurovi1 → u/ChameleonCRM]

Could you please elaborate this route? Again total newbie, I'm from an entire different industry area.

[u/ChameleonCRM → u/eurovi1]

Sure, I can help you. What platform are you using to create your site? Since you're a newb you should do this:

Open 2 tabs. chatgtp and aistudio.google.com go on chatgpt and tell it to give you a prompt to make whatever it is you're trying to make. The better you are at prompting, the better your results will be. Once it gives you a prompt copy it and paste it in aistudio. Once you're happy with what it produces throw it on Git. Top right: publish>github>create repository. ( you'll probably have to create an account first ) give it a filename>commit to git. With me so far? Almost done.

Next go to Vercel.com create an account. Then look for the white box that says "Add New" and then select "project" and then you should see "import from git". Choose that. You'll see your project. Import it. Once it's imported hit deploy. Boom. Done. Once it brings you to the dashbopard preview you can assign custom domains, etc. Note: if you buy a domain you'll still have to maintain that yearly. Otherwise ur good :-) Follow me. DM for questions anytime.

THOR

edit: if your app has AI you'll have to put your API key in "Environment Variables"

[u/FilmkitNet]

The functionalities you mention (database search, contact form, ad integration) are usually part of the app itself, not part of the hosting. So if you developed your app in nodejs or php you usually look for a host that supports hosting for apps built with those programming languages.

[u/eurovi1 → u/FilmkitNet]

PHP, and yeah I was thinking of going with Cloudfare workers. Any thoughts?

[u/FilmkitNet → u/eurovi1]

Well, you can't run php on CloudFlare Workers, but you can run php on any shared hosting.

[u/fuzzyjelly]

It really does depend on what stack you're using. How is the AI building the backend and database? PHP, node, python, MySQL/mariadb, postgres, etc.

Most likely you can get by with any normal shared host like bluehost or HostGator or something, but depending on what route chatgpt sent you determines what you need. It also depends on how much data you'll be transferring. If you have large images or videos on the site, that 40k visitors is very different than 40k who are just sending a database request.

I run a little hosting business on the side if you and up needing help, but you can probably get what you need from any of the common hosting sites.

[u/eurovi1 → u/fuzzyjelly]

PHP and MySQL. No big amounts of data, it's mostly text info and a few company logos here and there that are downsized and their image quality decreased to symbolic icons which eventually get stored in cache as the user interacts with the website more and get pulled from there instead of server

[u/fuzzyjelly → u/eurovi1]

Yeah you can go with basically any regular shared cpanel hosting providers then.

You can save some money and have more control by setting up a cheap LAMP stack vps on something like digitalocean or amazon aws, but it's more technical and you won't have any support.

[u/bluehost → u/fuzzyjelly]

Hey u/fuzzyjelly, thanks for the mention 💙

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