Which hosting plan for a directory or classifieds site: listings, search and spam

Choosing the Right Plan··· 132 views· 3 min read

The short answer: a directory or classifieds site is heavier than a presentation site: lots of people writing, searching and uploading images, and caching helps less when users are logged in. You can start on a shared plan, but expect to move up. The biggest problem, before weight, is usually spam.

What weighs, and what does not

Part of the site What to do
User-submitted listings They attract spam and scams. Moderate before publishing, limit submissions and validate the forms: A website form that is safe and spam-free.
Fake sign-ups Accounts created by bots fill the database. See Fake orders and spam sign-ups and Stopping spam comments.
Search It gets slow with many listings if the database has no indexes: Database indexes.
Images Each user uploads their own, unshrunk. Limit the size and resize on upload: Image optimisation.
Many processes at once Users online at the same time occupy processes: Entry processes.

How to choose, step by step

1 Start on a shared plan with the spam protections on from day one.
2 Set the moderation rules and who applies them, before opening to new advertisers.
3 Measure the usage: How to monitor your site performance in cPanel.
4 Move to a VPS or Cloud when search gets slow, when process-limit errors appear or when the number of users online at once grows.
If the site collects user data, you have duties towards it: consent, access requests and deletion. See Customer data in your shop. Rules vary by country.
Give each listing its own address and a unique text. Repeats from several advertisers make Google treat similar pages as duplicates.

Building a directory or a classifieds site? Tell us how many listings and users you expect.

Open a support ticket

In our plans

SituationPlanWhy
Starting out: few listings, moderated by handPro1 site, 10 GB SSD NVMe, unlimited databases and unlimited e-mail accounts on your own domain.
Advertisers upload many imagesPlus or Ultra20 GB (Plus) or 30 GB (Ultra) SSD NVMe, and Plus allows 6 sites, Ultra unlimited.
Many users online at once, slow search, process-limit errorsVPS or CloudResources of your own: VPS2 has 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM and 80 GB NVMe, and Cloud2 has 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 50 GB NVMe.

When to move up: move up when search gets slow with more listings, when process-limit errors appear, or when the number of users online at the same time grows, because caching helps less when people are logged in. Watch the usage in cPanel (see How to monitor your site performance in cPanel), and also the e-mails the site sends to users, which have an hourly limit in the shared plans (100 in Pro, 200 in Plus, 300 in Ultra). The spam protections are part of how you build the site (forms, moderation, validation), so keep them on at any plan. Moving up can be done at any time without losing the site, and every plan has an automatic daily backup with free restores.

SEE ALSO

A website form that is safe and spam-free: honeypot, captcha and validation

Database indexes in phpMyAdmin: the types, the column order, and how to add one

Entry processes: why a site with few visitors can still hit the limit

Which hosting plan for a membership, booking or course site where visitors log in

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