[talk] Hosting Recommendations - email/web

[Charles Sprickman]

Hi all,

In my capacity as a volunteer/director at a political group out here in NJ, I’m trying to work on getting us setup with something better than what’s in place right now (a random Endurance Group hoster).

Cost is a huge concern (non-profit).

We have about 100 mailboxes.

We have one main site that sees most of the traffic and about 30 that see very little traffic.  All are WordPress and that’s not changing anytime soon.

So…  decent standalone email, plus hosting that’s optimized for WP (ie: nginx/php-fpm/varnish plus some basic security protections against foot-shooting not possible in most shared hosting setups).  I’m also open to doing the hosting on a VPS somewhere and just dealing with maintaining it myself as part of my volunteer time for the org.  I’m not at all open to self-hosting email for lots of reasons…

Who are your go-to hosting firms?  Not high-end stuff, stuff you’d recommend to a friend with a small business or similar.  And since we’re a progressive organization, we’d likely be avoiding any firms that clash with our values.

I got an awesome recommendation for server hardware here not too long ago, figure you guys must have favorites in this field (unless you’re all just DIY I guess…).

Thanks,

Charles