The Best Hosting for Developers: Here's what to look out for

Web and other application developers often have unique hosting requirements as well. Depending on their orientation, they need a simple and cost-effective solution or one with extra flexibility, functions for conveniently managing different customer projects or particularly high performance. We show you the best hosting for developers and give you tips on choosing the best solution.

Classic web hosting: Get a functioning website quickly and cheaply

Classic web hosting offers are particularly worthwhile if you use a local development system and want to provide a website for your company or a customer quickly and as cheaply as possible. With a suitable shared hosting package, depending on the tariff, many projects can already be implemented, from a simple company website to an online shop. Sometimes prepared "1-click" installations of popular applications help to set up a CMS or shop system quickly. When making your selection, pay attention to the ratings of the provider and also to the guaranteed availability - the web hosting solutions from Host Europe, for example, guarantee you at least 99.9 percent uptime. Host Europe's cPanel WebHosting also has a few features that are interesting for developers. The modular hosting management cPanel simplifies common installation and administration tasks; You can install more than 125 applications with just a few mouse clicks. Professional tools and features make development more efficient, including a Git version controller for better teamwork, cron jobs, and the choice between current and older PHP versions for compatibility testing or legacy applications.

Virtual servers: Manage customer websites with high performance

If you want to manage several customer websites, it is better to use a virtual server with plenty of RAM. Because with shared hosting, numerous accounts have to share the available physical hardware, you cannot guarantee your customers that sufficient performance can always be accessed for all web applications. With virtual servers, on the other hand, you are allocated fixed resources (CPU cores, RAM, storage space) according to your tariff; should things get tight over time, simply switch to a higher configuration level.

Virtual servers are available with different Linux distributions and Windows servers, depending on your needs. They also have their own IP address. At Host Europe you will find a wide range of virtual server tariffs for a wide variety of requirements in terms of performance, administration or flexibility. The spectrum ranges from classic virtual server packages with up to 10 virtual CPU cores (vCores) and 32 gigabytes of RAM to root servers with dedicated hard drives or SSDs and admin access to kernel level and high-performance private cloud servers with up to 32 vCores and 256 GB RAM. With these solutions you have a lot of design freedom for individually configured and flexibly scaled virtual machines, also via container virtualization with Docker.

Managed Server: More convenience with high performance

Even if some providers relieve you of some administrative work, such as automatic backups, you usually have to take over the server administration of your virtual server yourself, which is why you should have the appropriate knowledge. At Host Europe, you can also get virtual servers as managed "web server packages" where Host Europe takes care of the server administration, updates and security patches. Here you have the choice between the performance-oriented Classic WebServer tariffs and the cPanel WebServer solutions, which have been optimized for the convenient administration of many customer sites. With both offers, you do not have quite as much freedom in setting up and configuring your systems as with unmanaged virtual servers, but you can still make many individual settings yourself via the customer information system from Host Europe, FTP and SSH.

You get Classic WebServer with up to 16 GB RAM and 1,000 MySQL databases on SSD, permanently free SSL certificate and performance features such as nginx cache and APCu as well as individually selectable PHP memory limit of up to 1,024 MB. Developers of smaller web projects in particular do not usually need quite as much performance, but they appreciate functions for the convenient administration of their customer websites. This is provided by the administration tool cPanel already mentioned, which not only facilitates new installations, but also the administration of databases and applications or the protection of websites via Auto SSL. All included domains are secured free of charge with an SSL certificate, which is automatically renewed before it expires. cPanel WebServers are available with up to 4 vCores and 8 GB RAM.

WordPress hosting: Develop WordPress sites faster and more conveniently

As a developer, you particularly appreciate hosting packages that relieve you of work and make routine tasks easier. Because of the enormous spread of WordPress, there are of course also hosting offers that are specially tailored to this CMS. They make the installation and maintenance of WordPress easier and, in the best case, are also tailored to the resource requirements of WordPress. An example of the latter is Host Europe's WordPress hosting plans. These complete solutions for the professional operation of WordPress websites not only offer pre-installed WordPress in a hosting environment optimized for this purpose, but also store the WordPress database on an SSD to enable fast response times even with high access numbers. Other helpful functions are automatic backups, virus and spam protection and a test environment (staging) at the push of a button. Host Europe also offers WordPress hosting as a shared hosting environment or as a virtual server for higher performance requirements.

Dedicated Server: Hosting for developers without compromise

If you don't want to make any compromises in terms of performance or flexibility, for example to securely operate many very demanding or business-critical applications, dedicated servers are the right hosting option for you. So-called bare metal servers usually offer very powerful premium hardware that a customer rents exclusively for his purposes. This means that you can use the full performance of all components of your server, including hard drives and I/O bandwidth, without restrictions and customize your system very individually. With the dedicated server packages from Host Europe, you will receive your server within 60 minutes with up to two 8-core CPUs, 256 GB RAM and 8 terabytes of HDD or 2 TB SDD memory on redundant disks with hardware raid and with a pre-installed operating system of your choice, administration tool (Plesk) and monitoring. Those who shy away from administration can also have dedicated hardware managed by Host Europe: dedicated web servers are available with up to 20 CPU cores, 128 GB RAM and 1.8 TB SSD or 7.3 TB HDD storage administrated in the same way as the Host Europe web server packages already mentioned and also include a comprehensive security package with directory, spam and virus protection.

Title motif: picture by Bruno /Germany on Pixabay