A long long time ago, I bought a domain or two, and a shared hosting plan from Dreamhost w/ unlimited bandwidth/storage. I don’t have root access, and can’t do containers on this. It’s been useful for a Piwigo instance to share scanned family photos. The problem I have is the limited resources really limit Piwigo’s ability to handle the large TIF files involved in the archival scans. There are ways around this, but they all add time to the workflow that already eats into my free time enough. I’m looking at moving Piwigo to my local server that has plenty of available resources. That leaves me with little reason to keep the Dreamhost space. So what’s a decent use case for cheap, shared hosting space anymore?
To be clear, I’m not looking for suggestions to move to a cheap VPS. I’ve looked into them, and might use one in the future, but don’t need it right now. The shared hosting costs about $10.99/month at the moment. If there was a way I could leverage the unlimited bandwidth/storage as an offsite backup, that would be amazing, but I’m not sure it would be a great idea backing up stuff to a webserver where there best security I can add it via an .htaccess file.
$11/m is a lot. If you just want a small site on shared hosting, try namecrane.com. For storage use Hetzner Storage Box.
Yes, through Namecheap. Right now it’s just hosting my personal site on WordPress, but I’m going to switch that soon due to Matt Mullenweg’s drama or just take it down entirely.
I read the details. He has a decent reason to ask WP to pay as they got brought by private equity and significantly dropped their contributions to the WordPress which is open source and hence relies on the community to feed back into the product.
You can always encrypt the backups you upload there.
Depending on the specs of the shared webspace it is possible to install some php based webdav software to easily sync files with it. KaraDAV for example.
If there was a way I could leverage the unlimited bandwidth/storage as an offsite backup, that would be amazing, but I’m not sure it would be a great idea backing up stuff to a webserver where there best security I can add it via an .htaccess file.
Your off-site backup solution shouldn’t have to care about that level of security because you should be encrypting your backups before they leave your network. Even if you have a solid backup host in the cloud, you still want to encrypt your backup data before you send it to their hosted repo.
Unless your vendor has a reason to read your backups, they shouldn’t be able to.
I did some experiments in the past. The nicer option I could find was enabling webdav API on the hosting side (it was an option on cPanel if I recall correctly, but there are likely other ways to do it). These allow using the webserver as a remote read/write filesystem. After you can use rclone to transfer files, the nice part is that rclone supports client side encryption so you don’t have to worry too much about other people accessing files.
