Cloudron Forum

So, I signed up for a VPS and went for the Medium VPS at 8.99 EUR to try it out. The performance was ok but I noted some initial lag on connect. I have a couple of UK VPS and one in Germany with Hetzner.

From my UK location, when I ping my UK VPSs I get an average of 20ms, with Hetzner its 32ms. With Contabo it's 80ms. That might not seem significant but really it is for a UK visitor connecting to a UK server.

I opened a ticket and politely asked about this. I suspected it was routing, Portsmouth is not the hub of the UK from a connectivity viewpoint, I appreciate that but just wanted to get their thoughts on it.

The response I got back was "Suggest you look for another provider".

Ok then, cancelled.

Just terminology, not winning and losing in the sense you think. ICANN refers to the registrar you are transferring away from as the losing registrar and the other as the gaining registrar.

@robi said in Moving a Ghost Blog to Wordpress:

Apparently there is @luckow

https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-properly-move-from-ghost-to-wordpress/

With https://wpghostimport.com/ converting the JSON export

Another path may be to use RSS to read all the posts into WP.

Nothing to lose right so I gave it a go. Worked incredibly well. Not perfect but it means I have a lot less to do.

@nebulon Thanks, I actually did that and to me at least the difference was nothing.

Digital Ocean = 26ms
Hetzner = 35ms

To me at least, that does not appear a significant difference in terms of visitor load time.

I have been converting a couple of websites to WordPress lately and wondered what people use or recommend as a theme or site builder.

Looking for something easy to use and feature-rich so that the time is spent on content not having to constantly code as I have been doing in the past. Much of my decision to move to Cloudron is about simplifying the whole end-to-end process.

I have looked at quite a few, some examples:

Divi - Nice enough, but not that flexible in parts though and remove it later it leaves way too much tag soup in the templates.

Elementor - Appears quite feature-rich, and easy enough to use, but I see mixed reviews about performance.

Blocksy - Very fast theme, with lots of options but more limited than the two above.

I seem to be gravitating to Elementor as the most flexible overall. Anyone else use it or have any other suggestions that you currently use?

Thanks

@girish All of my sites are just info blogs, a forum and a custom-built history site. They will be fine pretty much anywhere.

Going to go with Hetzner, as I say, not a cheapskate, was willing to pay Digital Ocean $40 per month but Hetzner Cloud gets as good if not better reviews and for much less money. Seems daft not to

@marcusquinn - I am fine with DO, Vultr and Hetzner to be honest. But when I saw a new UK location it was worth checking it out. The performance difference is night and day and clearly so is the support.

I wouldn't even have minded if they just fobbed me off but to tell me just to walk if I wasn't happy, lol.

@robi - Definately in Portsmouth, it's a configuration issue that is the cause, I gave them a full trace log back to Portsmouth showing precisely where the issue is, just needed a little tweak and it would have largely been sorted. Hence my support ticket to nudge them, which they didn't appear to appreciate

But regardless, whether you are paying 8 EUR for 6vCPU/8GB Ram or 27 EUR for 10vCPU/60GB Ram (lol) they are without doubt horribly oversold. Your mileage will vary. All about setting expectations and if you don't expect much then you won't be disappointed.

Like I said before, 20ms to 80ms may not seem much in isolation but there are other factors which impact visitors inside/outside of the UK and so on. For most that don't do a lot of optimization, it is unlikely to be a noticeable difference. So if Contabo works for people, then it's good for what it is.

@jdaviescoates said in Ghostboard.io - Analytics for Ghost blogs:

Mostly, I think, because doing basically anything with Ghost seems to require messing with code.

This is definitely a reason. It can be difficult to make any changes without going into the code.

I also don't like their 'integrations' which is a sloppy alternative to an app store for add-ons. A prime example, inserting images using unsplash, they have that built-in but it is kind of useless. If you directly add an image using the unsplash integration it can't resize it so your site ends up with large non-optimized images. Solution? Download the image and then upload it. WTAF?

Most of their integrations require adding things to the header, CDNs and so on, it just ends up bloating the site and slowing it down.

Far too opinionated in the way you should, perhaps must use it.

It is a great idea, works well for many who just want to start blogging and have no specific theme/plugin requirements but done in node.js has created so many limitations it's just not very flexible.

It would also be nice if Revolut would do a joint account, I am guessing their limited offering is due to what they can do without a full licence.

I do have Monzo and Starling, there are differences, but overall I just prefer Revolut for what I need it for.

But in any event and back on topic. Just don't use your regular accounts to make purchases on the internet when it comes to hosting and other services. Many get by without incident but you appreciate it when it does happen and the impact is next to nothing.

@luckow said in Moving a Ghost Blog to Wordpress:

@LeeW yep it's so simple. But to be fair: there is no magic import button to move your content from one cms to the other

Yeah, I knew that. It's going to take time to do it, but at least this way I can do it over a period of time then switch when ready, makes it so much easier.

When trying to setup a new Cloudron with Bunny.net as the DNS provider, I get the following message:

accessKey must be a non-empty string

The API key is correct; I can't figure out why I am getting that message or how to fix it. Any ideas?

Thanks

Lee

Apologies, went and put this in the wrong forum, can someone move please.

@timconsidine That's very useful, thanks.

@humptydumpty - Various issues, performance, support mainly. I think a lot of the support issues are due to the fact they still manage all support by email, with no ticket system to properly manage them.

One person signed up recently for the UK, and got set to EUR billing, he asked the same day of signup to change his billing to GBP, and they agreed to change it if he paid a $25 admin fee...

Also, have you noticed that all their pricing is in EUR by default, makes sense given they are in Germany. But a €5.99 plan when the currency is changed to GBP becomes £6.99..

It is always good to have another UK provider at this pricing level, but all of the hosting forums I visit regularly have threads about Contabo and none of them are good.

@marcusquinn said in Contabo: New UK Region:

Top be fair to any provider offering anything priced in single digits, but they time they've paid staff to answer an email or two the cost of business exceeds the income. I think most provider's smallest instances are really loss-leader marketing.

Not relevant in relation to the issue though. Whether I pay 8 EUR or 80 EUR, it will not change the problem of an 80ms roundtrip, it will be the same for any service within that DC. It could be teething issues that will get better, either way, not my concern anymore.

@humptydumpty This is why I never use a card I rely on for other things. All my hosting-related costs (everything on the internet in fact) go on Revolut, that way I never need to worry about cards being cancelled and I know for sure where the problem originates from.

RIP current pricing as well, won't be long before it goes up. Lot's going to change over at Linode over the next 12 months.