Hosting suggestions for M1 app

[valegal]

I'm closing off my business, but would like to continue to keep my M1 site up-and-running until I've sold off a good chunk of my remaining inventory. I was with Alpha Hosting (on a shared managed hosting plan) for a long time and things were chugging away nicely, but they have since been acquired by Liquid Web and the migration has been a complete disaster. Pages take between 15 and 30 seconds to load and is basically unusable. Actually, even more unusable at the moment because it has been down for almost a day.

Looking for suggestions for an affordable, reliable hosting provider for a low-traffic site with a budget less than $15/month.

[JLHC]

It is quite unfortunate to see that you are facing performance issue after the migration. 

Did you get in touch with their support team to try to troubleshoot and resolve the problem?

LiquidWeb and Nexcess are excellent brands so it is unlikely that their infrastructure is slow. I think it is more likely to be a configuration or compatibility issue which they should hopefully be able to identify and resolve so your store can load quickly again. 

[valegal]

Thanks James. The problem is that Liquid Web doesn't actually offer any shared hosting plans, so my guess is they've lumped all of Alpha Hosting's shared hosting users onto the smallest number of servers possible. I asked why I wasn't receiving the same service I'd received for years at Alpha, and they told me that the server I'd been on was "massively underutilized" and that "their loss was my gain". My site has been up for about 12 years on various hosting providers, and have never seen it load so slowly. I'm guessing they're doing this to either have everyone upgrade to one of their VPS plans, or scramble to find another hosting provider.

[JLHC]

LiquidWeb doesn't do shared hosting but I believe they have placed you under Nexcess instead which is their sub-brand. 

They should have support techs or engineers that can help you troubleshoot the problem. It is very unlikely to be something done on purpose. My suspicion is their platform may differ from Alpha Hosting so there may be some configuration changes needed to be made in your M1 store or possibly a different caching plugin / extension to use, for example. 

[valegal]

Unfortunately I was told flat-out that the only option is to upgrade to one of their VPS or Nexcess plans (even though I had prepaid for one year of shared hosting back in June with Alpha). And now, the site has been completely down for almost a full day. Will send yet another message, but unless they're willing to restore my service to what is was before for the remainder of my one-year contract, I don't see myself sticking with this company.

Again, any suggestions for alternative hosting providers? I'm a software dev, but not savvy when it comes to the hosting side of things. What would be the minimum requirements for a 1.7 install with relatively low traffic?

[Robert Rand]

Hi @valegal,

There has indeed been a lot of consolidation in the Magento hosting space, with companies like Zerolag, Sonassi, Nexcess, AlphaHosting(aka SimpleHelix), and Magemojo being acquired in recent years.

With Magento 2 having dependencies like Elasticsearch, there's also been a bigger push toward dedicated environments for Magento sites. In general, these environments have a variety of highly-valuable benefits, but the price tags are vastly different from old shared-hosting offerings.

You can take a look at the hosts that are partnered with Mage-One and OpenMage, the two entities that are known for providing patches for users that are still on Magento v1, but I'm not sure if you'll find any that will meet your criteria:

• https://mage-one.com/mage-one-partners/
• https://www.openmage.org/partners/index.html

I can also suggest taking a look at https://www.aspirationhosting.com/magento-hosting/. Last I knew, they were still offering shared hosting for Magento users.

Bast of luck!

[rimshadevr27ac]

I'm sorry to hear about your negative experience with your current hosting provider. Here is a suggestion for an affordable and reliable hosting provider that supports M1 app within your budget:

Devrims: Offers a wide range of hosting services, including cloud servers and managed databases. They have a straightforward pricing model and provide excellent performance. They offer plans starting at $10.95/month, making it a cost-effective option for low-traffic sites.