tl;dr: I’m looking for a simple web hosting provider that doesn’t cost upwards of $150 per year, to host a simple website consisting of nothing more than php files and images.
The long-winded version:
I’ve been with my current hosting company, WebHostingHub, for eight or nine years, and I’m looking to downgrade. I originally went with them because they had one of those “first three years at a low low price!” deals. Since then, I’ve stuck with them because… laziness, I guess.
I’m a math teacher at a community college. I post all of my lecture materials, and everything else to do with my courses, on my website. For the past four years or so, I’ve had a system installed on my site that allows students to create an account, log in to do online homework assignments, tracks their grades, and so on. For anyone interested, it is the engine that MyOpenMath.com uses. From the get-go, I started modifying the code to suit my own purposes, which, long story short, has made it virtually impossible to update the engine as improvements are released. Or at least more trouble that it’s worth. Anyway, MyOpenMath these days is way more advanced than my version, so I’ve decided to trash my version and just use them, linking to web pages from my own site for lessons and such.
Anyway. My current web hosting service has all sorts of features that I’ve never used, or needed. I’m not using e-commerce, I’m not building Wordpress pages, I don’t need all these tools that they provide. I write my pages in a text editor, and upload them to the server. They are written in php, with a small amount of javascript thrown in here and there. And with my planned downgrade, I won’t need sql anymore. So basically, all I need is a simple service to host my php files and images (mostly png format, of graphs made using GeoGebra, in the 15K to 50K range).
Here’s a sample lesson to get a feel for what I’m talking about. This one is heavy on images; most of my pages don’t have nearly as many.
https://www.theshapesofmath.com/public.php?cid=111&pid=C-6
I linked to an image-heavy page because one feature that I do like about my current host is the unlimited bandwidth. I’m not sure if I really need that, though. I suspect that even when I have a lot of students, the amount of traffic to my site is probably a paltry amount. Like right now, I’m teaching three classes. I’ve got a grand total of 85 or 90 students. I would guess that the upper limit of people accessing my site at the same time is, generously, 50. That scenario is while one of my classes is in session, where all 30 or so students are on at the same time, plus maybe more from my other classes who happen to be on during that time, as well. So is unlimited bandwidth something I should care about?
Lastly, when I do this, I plan to register a new domain and let my current one go. It’s too long, and I’m tired of having to type the whole thing in, or spell it out when giving someone my email address. A piece of advice I’ve read, from here on the SDMB, is that one should use separate services for domain registration and web hosting. I’ve currently got it all bundled in one. I’m thinking I’ll register a new domain and get a mailbox through Namecheap, then host my new site with someone else. Does that sound like a good plan?