I am selfhosting a lot of stuff, but some things are on good old DreamHost instead, for reasons of reliability and such. I’m sure many of you are in a similar position.
I’ve been extremely happy with DreamHost since ~28 years but various reasons prompt me to look for EU options. I am not looking for just plain stupid webhosting (not VPS) but the options I see are so limited: limited subdomains, limited mailboxes, limited databases, limited everything. DH has always offered “unlimited everything” for a few dollars per month, that’s an insanely good offering.
Still, if you could recommend a good EU webhosting provider, what would you say?
I pay ~8€ per month at DreamHost, for many, many domains and databases and mailboxes. I worry that having to maintain a VPS myself is tedious and risky, and there’s no automatic backups, and there’s no tech support, and it can’t possibly be as cheap. I’m fine hosting some stuff at home, but for some things (like mailboxes) I want a real independent service I can trust.
I have three VPS, and a rack in the closet. As far as maintenance is concerned, once you get everything set up and secured, there’s not a whole lot to ‘maintain’, imho. I check logs, make sure all the baddies are at bay and all my good stuff is secured. I leverage technology to help me. I get a summary in the morning telling me all services are up. I do that with n8n, but you certainly could put together something more than my basic n8n flow. I use Docker containers a lot, so I have dockerbot to check that all services are up and running. Dockerbot allows me to stop/start/restart containers. I use UptimeKuma to also keep track of services and send me updates, and I use the iOS app for UptimeKuma which has a handy widget.
Once a month I run
sudo apt update / sudo apt full-upgradeto make sure everything is updated. NBD there if you do it regularly and don’t skip a lot of updates/upgrades. Backups happen every night using the 3,2,1 method and backed up to an offsite facility. I have a bot that at regular intervals during the day, issuesudo lsof -nP -iTCP -sTCP:ESTABLISHEDand several other commands to the servers and reports back.All of this may sound like a lot, but really once you get everything grooving, it’s jippity jippity. I do business with:
One thing I’ve learned through the years is that one man’s dream VPS service, is another man’s nightmare VPS service. Making recommendations is kind of hit and miss for this reason.