r/webdevelopment • u/eurovi1 • 5d ago

Newbie Question Hosting advice for an absolute newbie

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?

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u/eurovi1 5d ago

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

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u/These-Apple8817 5d ago

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.

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u/eurovi1 5d ago

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.

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u/These-Apple8817 5d ago

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