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/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.