Recomended hosting for a makerspace site?

Discussion
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I’ve been putting together a basic website to promote Workbench Alpha, the makerspace we’re looking to set up for East London. Currently running just Doku Wiki and SMF, it’s more than my shared hosting can handle on top of my other sites.

not good

This is making it difficult to fully populate the site with info, and I suspect will make using it for promotion unlikely.

I’m onto tech support to check into temporary fixes, but I think this is going to need some dedicated hosting sooner than later. Recommendations for something affordable would be gratefully received. Having running costs before getting running wasn’t something we wanted.

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Assuming you don’t need any dynamic content, Github pages is a great way to host websites: https://pages.github.com

That’s where things like http://dorkbotlondon.org are hosted.

Alternatively, Heroku has a free tier that would probably do you: http://heroku.com/

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Hi Sci, my company BitFolk offers free VPSes for UK-based makerspaces and similar endeavours. The requirements I think are not particularly onerous:

https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Sponsored_hosting

But, this is a completely unmanaged solution and requires you to be in the position to set your software stack up from scratch on a Linux host, and manage it going forward. I am aware that other companies like Digital Ocean and Linode offer easy installers for popular solutions like Wordpress and Discourse and they are still very cheap.

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At Teesside Hackspace we host the static content in an AWS S3 bucket, use AWS Lambda / API Gateway / DynamoDB for dynamic content (e.g. membership system), and use free Mediawiki hosting from Miraheze. The total cost is under $1 / month.

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The Bitfolk offer certainly sounds good. What manner of proof is required to show it’s beyond the ideas stage if there’s no physical infrastructure as yet?

I’ve been spoilt by cPanel automation for some time. I can throw together this temporary site, but I’ll check with some friends if they’d be willing to handle setup from scratch.

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Whats the URL for the site?

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Don’t advertise it yet because we’re still adding & editing the content, but it’s www.workbenchalpha.org.uk
Technically it’s just Doku Wiki with a calender plugin and SMF with test user. There’s a google discussion list that will shift over to that forum once it’s fully set up with management plugins. It’s not mentioned on the site since it’s a temporary measure.

I’ve heard back from EUKhost tech support and they’ve boosted my available resources and told me to optimise the site better. Both long AFTER the overload apparently stopped of it’s own accord. No info on what actually caused it. So I’m still inclined to move it anyway as their tech support has really taken a dive this time. I’m also inclined to think the fault was some sort of timed script because it lasted exactly an hour and a half.

And as I type this it’s stopped serving pages completely. FFS.

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Let me know when you’d like it listed on http://openworkshopnetwork.com

Also almost all of the things on your To-Do list under IT Services:

Can be done with the software stack South London Makerspace uses including our membership-system.

The caveat to this is having everyone switch from Patereon to GoCardless which only charges 1% so you get more cash.