Have you ever used more than one hosting service at a time?

[Shawn Gossman]

At one time, I was using Dreamhost and HostGator.

I had a blog on HostGator and the rest of my stuff on Dreamhost.

I did that to test out HostGator. At the time, it was significantly cheaper. But you get what you pay for because, with just one not-so-popular blog, I had tons of problems. I'm just glad I didn't move everything over.

Ultimately, I decided to stay with Dreamhost, and they've been very good to me since.

 

[Tracy]

I don't use "hosting services", but VPS/dedi providers.
And yes, even right now I have two Contabo VPS instances (one for the NodeBB sites and then the other for a friends site and my blog) then my OVH server for my primary site.
I'm not big on shared hosting and haven't been for over a decade. I try to run my own VPS/dedi for the sites I have. It's not that the sites would not work on shared, but it is a hassle if you decide to move off of them to a VPS/dedi down the road. Many of them have you depend on phpMyAdmin to export your database, and all it takes is one glitch in the transfer and your data can be corrupted. Have helped many an admin over the last 12 years because of that.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I don't use "hosting services", but VPS/dedi providers.
And yes, even right now I have two Contabo VPS instances (one for the NodeBB sites and then the other for a friends site and my blog) then my OVH server for my primary site.
I'm not big on shared hosting and haven't been for over a decade. I try to run my own VPS/dedi for the sites I have. It's not that the sites would not work on shared, but it is a hassle if you decide to move off of them to a VPS/dedi down the road. Many of them have you depend on phpMyAdmin to export your database, and all it takes is one glitch in the transfer and your data can be corrupted. Have helped many an admin over the last 12 years because of that.

I usually recommend shared hosting to new forum owners starting out that can't afford a VPS but heck, today they're pretty cheap compared to what they were back in the day.

Dreamhost has a VPS plan starting at $10 a month

 

[Tracy]

Dreamhost has a VPS plan starting at $10 a month

Contabo has them for around $6 USD a month. Granted, not the greatest performers but The Pipe Stand, XFH and Ideology Central are all running on one. The latter two are one the same one and TPS is one one that has 3 WP blogs running on it. It's their VPS-1 line (4 vCPU Cores/6 GB RAM/400GB SSD). Right now they have them for $4.95 a month for life (10% off sale).

For the money, I can't really complain as they are cheap enough (less than a cup of coffee) a month to spin one up and play with.

 

[meetdilip]

I used to. It is better to use more than one. As they say, not to put all your eggs in one basket.

 

[Cpvr]

I don’t, but I would if I needed another server—especially to power the database and one dedicated to running the web server.



Personally, I’ve always stuck with just one provider, even when I owned a dedicated server a few years ago.

 

[frm]

I don’t, but I would if I needed another server—especially to power the database and one dedicated to running the web server.

You probably won't need a solution like that unless you have thousands of active users and millions of posts (including conversations).

You should just scale up vCPU/RAM as needed. And, when you reach that breaking milestone, or when the prices just make sense, look into multiple instances.

Speaking Vultr pricing, the lowest managed database instance on Cloud is $50 ($70 for 1 extra replication).

For $50, you can get Shared 3 vCPU/8 GB RAM with 180 GB storage or Dedicated 2 vCPU/4 GB RAM/75 GB storage, both of which are powerful enough to run 100,000s of thousands of threads and hundreds of users. This is if you take the time to optimize everything (caching, etc.).

Probably has a bit of latency with a Cloud database, so you'd probably want to go with High Peformance at $84 for 1 vCPU/2 GB RAM/64 GB space, with the space barely being enough to have daily backups for a week with over 1 million posts. You'd probably benefit from 1 vCPU/8 GB RAM/150 GB storage for $375 ($575 with replication) the most at that point.

If you're looking for just database redundancy, you can always get $6 1 TB Object Storage to back the database up, or attach a new HDD for $1/40 GB or $1/10 GB NVMe to take backups that can be restored quicker than from Object Storage.