HOSTING
Hosting is the first thing beginners overpay for and the first thing that burns them later. And they get burned not by the price but by limits nobody writes down in large print.
Let’s go through it simply: what to take for which job, how shared hosting differs from a server, and which traps we walked into personally.
The rule is simple: a site goes on shared hosting, a bot goes on a server. Don’t mix them.
Three types of job — three types of hosting
How shared hosting differs from a server
On shared hosting you rent space on a shared machine. Everything is already configured, there’s a control panel, and support fixes problems for you. In exchange you control almost nothing: you can’t install your own programs, you can’t keep a process running permanently, and some ports are closed.
A VPS is a separate machine where you are the owner. You can install anything and run anything. In exchange you configure it all yourself, updates and security included. If the server goes down at night, you’re the one bringing it back up.
Don’t try to save money by cramming a bot onto shared hosting. It’s the classic mistake: at first it seems to work, then the process gets killed silently, the bot drops out overnight, and you spend a week hunting a bug in your code that was never there.
The traps we walked into
Closed ports on shared hosting
The form on the site stopped delivering leads to Telegram. Half a day of diagnostics later it turned out the host had every outbound connection closed except ports 80 and 443. Any proxy on a non-standard port dropped instantly, before it even reached the network.
The interesting part: this isn’t a fault, it’s an anti-spam measure for unverified accounts. It’s cured by linking a phone number in the control panel, after which the limits lift automatically. It isn’t written anywhere visible — you only find out from a support ticket.
Email that never sends
The second common story: the site says «message sent» and no message arrives. On many shared hosts the mail transport simply isn’t configured. Don’t bang your head against it — install an SMTP plugin and send through a proper mail service.
Country-level blocks
If your server sits in Russia, some services are unreachable from it. And they fail differently: some connections are refused instantly, others hang until timeout. The difference matters — an instant refusal means a local ban by the host, while a timeout almost always means a block at the provider or regulator level. That one signal gives you the diagnosis in a minute instead of a day.
Backups that aren’t there
Auto-backup exists almost everywhere, but the retention depth is usually a week, and restoring is sometimes a paid service. Don’t rely on the host alone: once a month download an archive of the site and a dump of the database for yourself. Five minutes that will save the project one day.
What to look for when choosing
- SSH access. Even on shared hosting. Without it any non-standard task turns into torture through a file manager.
- Real support. Write to them with a technical question before you buy. The speed and the content of the answer will tell you everything.
- Free SSL. That’s the norm now. If they want money for a certificate, the host is behind the times.
- The limits in the small print. Ports, background processes, the daily email cap, the database query cap. This is exactly where the surprises hide.
- The ability to move out. Full access to the files and the database. If a host won’t let you download a dump, it’s a trap.
What this costs at the start
So there are no illusions: to launch a site and one bot you need shared hosting for roughly a couple of dollars a month, an entry-level VPS for five to seven, and a domain for ten to fifteen a year. That’s it. This isn’t the expense line to save your time and nerves on.
After that you grow with the load: hit the memory limit, add memory; hit the disk limit, add disk. Starting with a powerful server to grow into makes no sense — that money just burns.
Everything below is verified by invoices and support tickets, not by review sites.