CrowsNest

The Hosting Library

No Dewey Decimal System.
We made our own.

Useful hosting reading from around the web. No library card. No overdue fines. Just things worth reading before the siren song gets expensive.

CrowsNest Shelf Code

Browse the shelves

The classification system is home-grown. The links are free-range.

100 Hosting Basics Shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, managed and unmanaged hosting. 0
Shelf being stocked. Apparently useful hosting material does not shelve itself.
200 Performance CPU, RAM, I/O, IOPS, PHP workers, caching and storage. 0
Shelf being stocked. Apparently useful hosting material does not shelve itself.
300 WordPress WordPress hosting, staging, backups, WP-CLI and object caching. 0
Shelf being stocked. Apparently useful hosting material does not shelve itself.
400 Security & Reliability CDNs, WAFs, DDoS protection, SSL, uptime and redundancy. 0
Shelf being stocked. Apparently useful hosting material does not shelve itself.
500 Control & Access Control panels, SSH, cron, root access and server management. 0
Shelf being stocked. Apparently useful hosting material does not shelve itself.
600 Limits & Fine Print Inodes, bandwidth, CPU seconds, databases, email and hidden limits. 0
Shelf being stocked. Apparently useful hosting material does not shelve itself.
700 Buying Hosting Pricing, renewals, refunds, migrations, support and contracts. 0
Shelf being stocked. Apparently useful hosting material does not shelve itself.
800 Real-World Reviews & Tests Independent benchmarks, comparisons and long-term reviews. 0
Shelf being stocked. Apparently useful hosting material does not shelve itself.
900 Fiction Hosting claims that deserve a second look before you reach for the credit card. 1
CN-901 Maybe. Not proven.

“Your shared hosting is slow. Switch to VPS hosting.”

A VPS can give you more isolation and control, but “VPS” is not a magic performance switch. The bottleneck may be the site, the database, caching, traffic, configuration — or the host itself. Moving the same problem to a VPS can simply make it a more expensive problem.

Before upgrading, ask: what resource is actually exhausted, and will this VPS fix that specific bottleneck?

From the Library HostGator VPS and Shared Hosting Review Tom’s Hardware
Read the real-world test

Tom’s Hardware tested HostGator shared and VPS plans. In several database and WordPress benchmark tests, the shared plan matched or outperformed the VPS — a useful real-world reminder that the product label alone does not determine performance.

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