Hi LS Community,

After running LS on a Managed VPS for quite some time, my host hiked up the costs by 100%. They said it is due to the price increases of Cpanel, but still, this is not an accetable behaviour.

I had some issues a while ago with running Nextcloud on the same server, which their support could not solve (upload of big files would not work) and the VPS can't be updated to a new version of Cent OS. So I was already thinking about moving away from them, because moving to a new server with them would cost a fortune and as the "managed" is obviously not soo well managed if they can't figure out the problem with not being able to upload files bigger than 2GB to Nextcloud (moved my nextcloud to Contabo and had no problems with big files).

Now to my question: What Host (VPS or Cloud) can you recommend, that will guarantee a good and stable performance with LS (Limesurvey Pro is not an option for this, as I have other applications running).

As I said, my Nextcloud is currently with Contabo, and I can't really complain, especially for the price. But I am not sure if I would trust Contabo (known to be relatively cheap) with a productive Limesurvey installation (my Nextcloud is not sooo critical, as it is only used to provide files to the clients and if the server is down for a few minutes, this won't kill anyone).

I (currently) don't really use LS for production, but on the other hand, I would like to be ready if I must.

So if you have any recommendations/experience, I would be happy to hear (also negative ones - stay way...).

Hey holch, our Pro-Hosting is running on Hetzner in Germany.
I personally also use it for my online and hosting needs. Good service and great performance.

Thank you for the quick feedback. I assume that the LS Pro-Hosting is on dedicated servers, which would be a little overkill for my needs. I could not find any VPS options, but I did not look through the website throughly yet.

Do you personally also use a dedicated server? Any experience with their "Cloud" service?

holch wrote: They said it is due to the price increases of Cpanel, but still, this is not an accetable behaviour.

cPanel was bought by the same Investor as Plesk. They changed the pricingmodel from server/vps to cpanel accounts on the server. The pricing change was not introduced with a long prenotification. So provider have a big increase in costs when using cPanel with a lot of accounts on one server.

As I said, my Nextcloud is currently with Contabo, and I can't really complain, especially for the price.

Depends on the backupconcept. Do you have a VPS or a dedicated server in mind?

Since Hetzner was mentioned you can take a look at HetznerCloud, which has only issue. If your instance is down (not the whole cloudserver), you will need to contact support during the German daytime from Mo-Fr.

I have good experience from www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/dedicated-...managed-cloud-server

Depends on the backup concept. Do you have a VPS or a dedicated server in mind?

A dedicated server would be overkill for the little I use it. I think a VPS can hold a normal survey without problems, given that you don't send ten thousands of invitations at the same time. Even then, the majority won't even read or open the email anyway and not everyone is eager to respond immediately.
For the current situation with the Nextcloud I don't really have a backup concept. Should something happen I would have to set it up again and upload the files again. But I think, given the chances that this might happen, it is less work and hassle to set all things up again than to bother with a backup system. The files are only there to transfer them to the client. The backup happens on our local servers and once the client has downloaded the files, they are being deleted from nextcloud immediately.

Now for Limesurvey that might be different. But what I generally do is checking participation once a day (if a busy survey more often) and also download the answers collected so far. Maybe I should have a second instance ready to switch, but as I don't use it much for production, it might be overkill anway.

DenisChenu wrote: I have good experience from www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/dedicated-...managed-cloud-server

I have never heard of them, but their offer looks good on first sight. Need to dig a little deeper on what they are offering.

Pricing is a little high for what I was looking at, but given that it seems to be managed and that it includes also daily backups of everything, the price (starting at 29 Euro) is not exaggerated for 2 CPUs, 6GB of Ram and 100 GB of SSD space. Might be a little to expensive for what I was looking at, but for what it offers, it seems to be fair.

What interface are they using? Cpanel? Plesk? Else?

Own restricted

I don't know about Hetzner Cloud.
I have taken a dedicated server, because their "Server-Börse" often has very cheap and super powerful servers.
You can also always buy an automatic backup-space, that you can configure freely, It is included when the server costs are above 50€, but you already mentioned that that is probably too expensive.

Yes, 50 Euros would be a bit steep for what I am using it. Limesurvey is installed, but rather to have than that it would get used much in production and if so, for rather uncritical stuff. I was rather thinking of a VPS around and under 20 Euros. But, if the offer looks good, there might be some more budget.

Some littlest price : www.kimsufi.com/fr/vps-ssd.xml

My personal website and email are still on my old kimsufi at 200€/year …

yeah, Kimsufi is a little to hardcore for me. I would rather like to find something in between.

But all the tips were already quite helpful. To be honest, the Infomaniak link looked very interesting. Especially as the server is "managed" and the features are pretty good for the price. It's more than what I wanted to spend, but it is not too far away either.

Will need to do some research on their admin panel, because smaller things I want to do myself (e.g. setup new email accounts/forwarders, etc.), for bigger stuff like problem solving I would then bother the support.