Those on Twitter already know that I’ve been tasked with managing the club email list because I am the secretary of the Milford Amateur Radio Club. I asked on Twitter if anyone had any hints and I mostly got sympathy.
So I looked for something, and stumbled upon CiviCRM that looks like it may help. CiviCRM is an open-source Customer Relations Management system that looks pretty cool.
The problem is, it requires MySQL 5.1. That’s not a problem FOR THEM. It’s a problem FOR ME. I use GoDaddy shared hosting, and they have resisted every MySQL upgrade since 5.0. So I looked at GoDaddy’s forum, and found a cornucopia of people demanding it, all met with the same response of “we have no plans to upgrade that on the shared hosting plans, but buy a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or Dedicated Server. Now, I pay about $100 per year for “Ultimate Shared Hosting”. A dedicated server is $100 PER MONTH. A VPS is $30 (ish) per month.
Mind you, the shared hosting works perfectly for me, as it’s cheap (I make no money from my websites, neither directly nor indirectly. I don’t have the money to go to a dedicated server, nor do I have the money to go with a VPS, and if I did, I wouldn’t because I don’t want the added workload of administering a server. I used to do that, and I got away from it because I wanted to spend time on content rather than computer administration duties.
So here I sit. Via Twitter, I’ve received recommendations for BlueHost, DreamHost, Linode, and WestHost (and had a nice twitter conversation with an account manager from WestHost). I haven’t made up my mind, and my hosting contract with GoDaddy is up in June. I’ve enjoyed great up-time and service from GoDaddy in the past, but running several versions behind on the backend database is not only an annoyance (for not being able to use CiviCRM), but it is absolutely frightening to think that I may have other peoples’ emails in a database on a server that isn’t being kept up-to-date with security patches.
GoDaddy, you have a week to meet my requirements. Upgrade to the latest MySQL. Else, Daddy, you’ll Go. Moving is a pain, but I will do what I have to do. And that is NOT a promise. I may decide to leave anyway because of how long this has been going on.
-73-
About the Author
8 Responses to Managing the Club Membership in the 21st Century (Part 1 of ???)
MySQL 5.0 is over 10 years old now. If GD can’t be bothered to keep the software on their shared servers up to date, just leave. There’s really no excuse for keeping out-dated software running by any kind of host.
I wholeheartedly agree. There is no excuse for a major webhost to be so far behind on software. And I don’t ask for much, just multiple domain hosting, Apache, and MySQL (really, that’s all I need for WordPress to run).
Interestingly on Twitter, I mentioned GoDaddy in my initial tweet that started this discussion. GoDaddy did not reply within the 23 hours it has been since that tweet. I guess they really care about their customers. When I reach out via that, their forum, and their comment form and there is no response, it is time to leave.
I appreciate your response on twitter yesterday. I’m going to compile a list of all those (and Russ’s below) and see which one fits my needs the best. 73!
Andrew:
Maybe it’s time to find new hosting. Ive been using Total Choice Hosting since 2003, pay $55/year (for my purposes that’s just fine) for their “Silver” level hosting… and they use MySQL 5.1.68. In fact, they seem to keep all of the available services/daemons fairly well up-to-date.
http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/
Russ, I’m going to look into them. GoDaddy hasn’t responded, so it is time to leave them. Thanks for the comment, as I will add them to the list of hosts I look into so I can find the one that fits my needs the best. 73!
Civi is fairly resource intensive and does not work great on most shared hosting plans. We strongly encourage folks to spend a bit more on hosting to get decent performance
you might also want to look at specialized hosting providers like civihosting.com
lobo
Andrew,
Just read this post. I suggest you contact http://www.hamqso.net. These guys host websties for Ham Operators for $12 per YEAR!! I run my website there. I just checked cPanel and they are running MySQL 5.1.68-cll.
73,
Mike, AE8U
Mike, the latest version of MySQL is 5.8. 5.1 is pretty far behind, and not much better than GoDaddy.
I like nosupportlinuxhosting.com. 1 dollar a month. Of course they offer ZERO support. But I now use nosupportvpshosting.com instead. Same company, 15 dollars a month for a vps and it’s pretty decent.
Of course there are the administration overhead you talk about. But honestly, once you get it set up, really not that bad for a single server or two. Use that and put cloudflares free cdn in front of it, good to go.