Cheaper web hosting solution for my blog, email and static landing page?

February 23, 2016 9:14 PM

What would you suggest for a hosting solution for my WordPress blog? I need it to have support for a couple of static pages and pointing to top-level domain name

I currently have a Wordpress blog at my own domain name (sub-domain, actually) through bluehost.com. I update it once every few weeks and there is not much traffic hitting it. The only reason to keep the blog running is to provide a professional anchor to any web searches and also to enhance my reputation for any references/networking folks.

I also use the email server facility there to have a [e-mail] - the webmail UI is terrible, so I simply forward all email to GMail.

I have a static page at mydomainname.com that links to my Linkedinprofile, my blog, Twitter handle, my CV etc.

I joined when bluehost offered a package for 3 years, but now its gotten quite expensive. I am looking for any recommendations to move all of this to a single service or to different services, but retain my domain name across all of them.

posted by theobserver to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Best answer: I have been a very happy customer of NearlyFreeSpeech.net for my extremely modest webhosting needs. It's a pay-as-you-go model, so if your site is small, it's pretty economical. They are kind of bare-bones, but whenever I've had to deal with Support (once or twice in eight years!) they've been very good.

I do not use their email service, so I can't provide any insight on that front.

In 2015 I paid $21.27 for hosting for the year.
posted by invokeuse at 9:21 PM on February 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

If you're up for migrating from WordPress to Octopress, you could go with fully static hosting, which ranges from pennies a month to completely free.

As for email, you could edit the DNS record to route it directly to Gmail.
posted by Phssthpok at 9:31 PM on February 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

www.holeinthewallhosting.com is $19/year. I don't know how they'd handle high traffic but for my very low traffic sites they've been great.
posted by Awfki at 9:57 PM on February 23, 2016

Best answer: Another shout for NearlyFreeSpeech. I pay a lot less than invokeuse: my site gets almost no traffic so I pay next to nothing. If your site is busier, I like Namecheap hosting where my partner's bill is about $20/quarter.
posted by anadem at 10:05 PM on February 23, 2016

Another vote here for Nearly Free Speech.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:15 PM on February 23, 2016

I've been happy with gandi.net, which is between $4 and $5 per month.
posted by neushoorn at 10:29 PM on February 23, 2016

Host the website at github pages for free, shift the domain to Google domains and pay $12 / year to forward your email wherever you like (so, in this instance: gmail).

Man, I should be doing this. Currently paying a tiny fortune for domain hosting / email mx!
posted by pharm at 2:55 AM on February 24, 2016

(You can also host a static website on Amazon S3 for pennies IIRC, but it’s a bit more complex to set up.)
posted by pharm at 3:01 AM on February 24, 2016

I use A Small Orange's $5/month plan.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:33 AM on February 24, 2016

I use Hawkhost and I pay about $40/yr total for 10G, which is more than enough for your needs.
posted by zix at 8:06 AM on February 24, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks - I now have a few options to explore

Hosting on Amazon S3 seems cheapest although there is a quite a bit of work to be done to get it up and running.

At this point, I want to stay with Wordpress, since I have a few plugins that I need and I also have a purchased theme that will not work with other blog platforms :(

Hawkhost seems the best fit, since it offers direct Wordpress installation (compared to A Small Orange), but I need to dig a bit deeper.

I also have to figure out the email part as well.
posted by theobserver at 7:13 PM on February 24, 2016