Well further to my last post, Bluehost are only doing free SSL for Wordpress.
So I’m now in the market.
Happy to help you get started at Chillidog. Just let me know 
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Hands down Chillidog. IMHO, no other hosting company provides you with the same level of care and service that Mr. Barchard does. I currently use Puppy VPS offered by Chillidog and I love it.
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As a recent convert to the Puppy VPS, I’m really glad you’re enjoying it
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Does anyone use Amazon S3 to host their site?
Ah right. I’m just looking into creating an account to store some download resources and they say they can host full sites.
I’ve already moved my main email account to Gregg, so I am supporting the coffee habit as it were, but the disk space and bandwidth seem to be quite small when compared to what I have with Bluehost. I know unlimited is a gimmick, but It’s nice to know that I don’t need to worry about things on that front.
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It is feasible to host static websites on Amazon:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/swh/website-hosting-intro.html
A simple site published with RapidWeaver will work perfectly. You can point your domain name there too. I’m surprised that more people don’t go this route. Amazon is really cheap and the documentation they put together is some of the best (hence limited one-to-one support).
However, you have to remember that you don’t get a normal ‘CPanel’ or other frontend to administrate your website with. No PHP, SQLite or MySQL support. So you often need to have the expertise to setup additional ‘appliances’ and other Amazon services to do anything more than a static website.
’Unlimited’ hosting is a con - a false economy - nothing more than a cheap bribe. Shared hosting companies physically cannot give you a trillion teraflops of diskspace and bandwidth! Like the airline industry often rents planes and buys aviation fuel months in advance; many hosting companies work on a similar basis; they rent or part-share infrusture and estimate how much bandwidth they need to buy for their customers going forward.
For this reason, an ‘unlimited’ host will be quick to shut down any website they feel is in breach of a fair usage policy. This is there ‘get out clause’. Simply a threshold to ensure what you use and pay them each month doesn’t exceed the wholesale price they are paying the next company higher up the chain. Everyone is in it to make some money!
It would be better to use a company like Chillidog hosting for what it does best - serving webpages quickly and reliably (with RapidWeaver specific support available if you need it). Use Amazon S3 as a suitable backend warehouse for all your big files. Remember that Dropbox and Netflix use Amazon S3, so that’s proof it is cheap and reliable!
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May I ask how long you have been using falcoda for please? TIA
I looked at Falcoda as they’re British, but the SSL certificate seemed to bump the cost up.
Thanks Bazza, if I am only producing portfolio based sites with no money or ‘personal’ data being taken from visitors, do I need to worry too much about SSL? THANKS!!
SSL will effect your search engine page ranking. There’s no reason today to choose a hosting company that doesn’t offer free certificates. Everything on the internet should be encrypted if nothing else for your customers privacy.
There’s lots of choices in hosting companies.
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For my money (and indeed my site) it has to be Chillidog
Paul
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What Doug said. Some browsers will show and alert which never looks good.
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At present Google Chrome shows an ‘Unsecure Site’ alert in the browser bar when you are filling in a form on an http site. From July this year Chrome will show this warning on EVERY page of http sites not just those where you are interacting. It’s probably only a matter of time before a) the warning gets more prominent and b) other browsers follow suit.
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I have used Little Oak since day one and initially recommended by Rapid Weaver. To be frank, they have never let me down even when I have been slightly emotional once when the site went down at no fault of theirs.
I am impressed with their service.
I’ve used Little Oak for several years and have been very happy with the support. Recently, the fact that Little Oak doesn’t provide SSL has become a problem. I’ve got to get SSL through Cloudflare, and that seems to cause problems when I try to update my sites. I used to pause Cloudflare to update, but that option seems to have gone away. I’ve been trying to update today and Rapidweaver can’t connect to the site. The real issue, I think, is that hosting the site one place and getting SSL from a different place makes it hard to locate where the problems arise. Little Oak knows about Little Oak, but not that much about Cloudflare. Cloudflare knows Cloudflare, not Little Oak. I’m considering a switch for that reason. A hosting company that provides SSL as part of the package (assuming it’s okay in all other respects) would be better.
The problem you’re having using FTP with Cloudflare more than likely has to do with the way you set up the DNS records on Cloudflare.
For your site’s security Cloudflare will “block” FTP/SFTP as to prevent hackers from accessing your site.
You have two chooses to fix this.
- Change the publishing settings in RapidWeaver to go to an IP address instead of a “named” server(will need to get this address from the hosting company). (preferred)
- Create a grey-clouded record for your FTP. This will bypass CloudFlare for FTP protocol request.
- Login to Cloudflare and select DNS
- If you have an FTP record change the status to be a “grey Cloud”.
- If you don’t have an FTP a record add one with the status set to “grey Cloud”
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169346-Using-FTP-with-CloudFlare-
@swilliam as always, many thanks for the kind words 
CloudFlare will protect the connection between Users and CloudFlare. CloudFlare will not be able to protect connections between CloudFlare and your host if the host does not have have a valid SSL certificate installed on your site.
As @swilliam kindly mentioned, Chillidog does provide free SSL certificates for all of your sites. All SSL certificates are automatically installed, updated, and renewed for you without having to do a thing. If you’re interested in migrating, please let me know. I handle all migrations for new users for free. This includes website files, databases, etc.
Cheers,
Greg