[MassPikeMike]

I maintain a moderately complex site for a nonprofit, with an e-commerce back end and a searchable full-text database. The budget is a shoestring (there's, like, one e-commerce purchase a week) and I don't have the time to keep a server patched.

For me, the right solution is "semi-dedicated hosting" from NameCrane.com. Really it's just high quality shared hosting with resource guarantees. You can pay anywhere from eight to 120 bucks a year depending on the amount of resources you want. For me the sweet spot is $15 a month for a quarter terabyte of NVMe storage, two cores, and four gigs of RAM.

Unlike with Mythic Beasts, you don't get to run your own persistent processes; you have to be content with the mysqld and lighthttpd provided. But on the plus side, you get backups, cron jobs, and good outbound email deliverability. SSH access is available. You don't get sudo, which is kind of the point, but you can install whatever software you want, as long as you "pip install --user" and "configure --prefix $HOME". That might take some getting used to, for folks used to a VPS; but it's a worthwhile trade-off for not having to do server admin.

[chubot]

(author here) Oh interesting, I haven't heard of them

I imagine this is a PHP site? They say:

cPanel or DirectAdmin with all the goodies: Litespeed, LSCache, PHP8, JetBackup & more

I have a PHP app, but also some Python apps ... How do you use Python? For cron jobs, or with CGI?

[indigodaddy]

Cpanel Python support I believe is more robust than DirectAdmin, some pretty good info here at cpanel doc site:

https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/articles/360049921014-Ho...

RE: the CloudLinux-specific python features, I _think_ Namecrane has cloudlinux on all their shared/crate plans

And since namecrane I believe also uses litespeed on most or all of their plans, here's some related info that includes some python things: https://docs.litespeedtech.com/lsws/cp/cpanel/cloudlinux/

PS BuyVM/Namecrane/Frantech have an active discord with good/active/friendly company participation. Nice little community..

BTW I really enjoyed your article! This topic isn't explored that much these days and was a breath of fresh air

[chubot]

I'm glad you liked the article! I hope to write some follow-ups -- this kind of thing has been bugging me for 1 to 2 decades :-)

I think it's mainly the stability. I don't think it should be that hard to serve some static web pages and some output from a Python script. Yet even Google internally had like 10 different solutions that were constantly being deprecated

Most software infrastructure really assumes you have a big team behind everything, because you need a team to make money

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I was not aware of the Litespeed server ... I looked through the source code and it looks well done!

I think it's a shame that nginx doesn't support the ~/user model with CGI. I mentioned in the post that it seems to recommend uwsgi, but I think that is a bad and non-Unixy protocol

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I'm not sure if I would rely on the Phusion server on shared hosting -- I mentioned in the previous post that Dreamhost quietly deprecated it:

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/06/cgi.html#contrast-gate...

And it supports a few languages as special cases, which I don't like. I would like to plug in my language YSH without modifying their codebase! It should be a Unix-y protocol

[indigodaddy]

Hard to get better value than the smorgasbord of offerings that Namecrane has on the books right now. Domain reg is coming soon as well.