Best Web Host for Backlight

Backlight 4, 5 & 6 Support
1

Any suggestions for an affordable web host for Backlight 5… I’m on DreamHost that is working just shopping before I renew…
Thanks,
Brock

Advice on best provider for switching an existing copy of Backlight 3/4
Help with BL6, no longer working
Help! "Unexpected error: Module 'mysqli' already loaded in Unknown on line 0"
2

I’ve been using Bluehost. Matt used to recommend them but I’m not sure if he still does. They’re ok and it works for me, although I get a lot of bounced emails because I think some spammers use Bluehost servers.

3

I had blue host for years with mail bouncing. Also had problems with my Backlight sites that had to be fixed on their end. Decided to stay with Dreamhost and pay the regular price for three years. I have had no problems with Dreamhost in the past three years.

4

I have been using IONOS ever since I’ve had Backlight (not even sure how long that is, but it’s been a while). Also used them for a business website back when I had a business. I’ve never had a problem with them. I do make it a point to keep PHP up to date, but they always warn when they’re getting ready to drop an older PHP. The only email problem I had there was when I neglected to make a configuration change that they warned me about.

5

I’m a big fan of SiteGround. Been on there for a very long time, and have hosted several sites.

6

We no longer recommend Bluehost. They’ve slid far downhill.

7

It has been some time since this discussion was active. I have used Bluehost since 2011 for my TTG site and am getting more and more downtime messages from my site monitoring service, https://site-quality-monitoring.com/, load times are slowing down, costs are escalating. I am subscribed to their Prohosting service, but am progressively disappointed.

For a US based website, anyone with thoughts on an alternative for the new year?

8

here’s a related post

9

Well. I did it. On Bluehost my site had become virtually unusable with page load times measured in seconds, 7-9, inflated file size reports, increasing costs, failure improve even after purchasing yet more services, etc. I have divorced Bluehost.

I created a mirror site on my Synology NAS, thanks all here who posted their experiences, and found that the NAS running on home fiber in the US, I had load times of 800 ms and reported total file size of 97GB (not 200 as reported by BH).

Based upon comments here and elsewhere I have moved to IONOS which I believe has international servers and places your site on the closest server, in my case the US. Page load times for the migrated BH site are on the order of 800 ms and I don’t recall when I last saw my site so responsive.

Lessons learned:

  1. IONOS costs are ~1/3 for shared hosting than BH
  2. They, for a one time fee, transferred the entire site and database then set up a test URL to make sure everything worked.
  3. They then assisted with transfer of DNS from BH to IONOS, this took 4 days and my site was down for 3 days and email down for 1 day
  4. They assisted with updating MX DNS entries to reconnect my Google Workspace account and email
  5. Their shared hosting plans have an unlimited capacity; however, the number of files limit is 264,000 and that is fixed across all shared plans. They also have VPS plans which are also of manageable cost without this limit but have a capacity limit as they run on SSD storage.

Regards,
James.

1 Like