Saratoga Template & Web Hosting

I use https://www.1and1.com/ for my web hosting…I have been for many years…

They have me paying $16.99 per month which compared to their current published pricing is very high…

I plan to call them today but was wondering if there is anything special that Saratoga/WD needs
to effectively host a WX site…I’ve been running my website since 2006 so maybe I’ve forgotten something
that web hosting requires…

appreciate any advice

Steve

The base Saratoga template has only a few requirements:

  1. PHP Version 5.3+ (to 7.x)
  2. allowed outbound http/https for scripts to access data on external websites (curl support for http/https too)
  3. ftp/sftp access to website (for weather software uploads of data)
  4. Linux/Apache prefered, but can work on Windows/IIS with some fiddling
  5. a cron job function is nice to have, but not required in most cases.

It will run on some free hosting sites like altervista.org (but not on others which do not offer outbound http/https access).

Generally, a ‘basic Linux/Apache’ shared hosting is fine for most personal weather websites and cost should be around $9-12/mo.

I hope this helps…

edit: as an aside, I used 1and1 ‘Business Linux Shared hosting’ for many years until the concurrent ftp limit of 5 connections forced me to move to a 1and1 VPS (Linux L) server where I manage the main site and multiple regional weather network sites. Having your own virtual server lets you free of some limitations of shared hosting, but also is not for the faint of heart as you become server admin too – fortunately, I have a background doing server and network admin, so the curve wasn’t too steep.

Very much so Ken…thanks…just got off the phone with 1and1…a little discussion about them not being competitive and the price came down to $11/month, same PRO package, something more agreeable…I’ve been using them since 2006 so maybe long term customer had something to do with it as well.

Thanks Again

Steve

FYI. A few of us have been using mddhosting.com since Erice went out. They have been rock solid. I now pay $3.50 a month. The only catch with this monthly rate is there is a traffic transfer max of 10gig per month but in all the years I