Reducing the cost of web hosting…

I am hosting my websites for more than 15 years on a web hosting service called IONOS (formerly 1and1), which is not free. I do this because it gives me a lot of flexibility for making websites. However, today, I received an e-mail from Ionos telling me that they think I am using too much traffic (over 50 GB per month), and thus they deactivate the CDN (Content Delivery Network) optimization that they offer for my websites. This won’t prevent my websites from being accessed but it may hurt the speed a little bit.

So why is there so much traffic on my websites? I do not have that many visitors. I think that the reason is that there are some large files that are hosted on my websites such as videos and datasets.

  • For videos, it might be a better idea to host them on an external website such as Youtube. I think that could reduce traffic by a good amount. I might change this. However, I like to have my videos on my own website so that they can be downloaded even from geographical locations where platforms like YouTube are not available.
  • For datasets, I will keep them on my websites as they are important, but I think that I will restrict the downloads to only the real visitors from my websites.

And as for IONOS, I have to say that I am not happy with IONOS. They charge a relatively high price, which they keep increasing, with not much improvement to their services. In fact, I think they almost tripled their price since I started using their services. And I also had other problems with that company in the last few years, such (1) four days of downtimes for a SQL database, and (3) a database being reverted to three years before and losing a good amount of data. Thus, I am thinking to move to another web hosting provider next year. But it requires some time to set up my websites properly, so I will have to think about it.

That’s all I wanted to talk about for today.

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