Favorite / Recommended Web Hosts

December 12th, 2006 | Category: Kevin's Stuff,Recommendations
written by: Kevin Adams

With the end of a semester here already, and a break coming up, I'm sure that many students and staff will be working again on personal Web projects. Now, of course there are opportunities for procuring server space right here on campus, but I'm betting that a good amount of us have purchased space from any number of available web hosts.

Bandwidth is cheap. So is storage. Its a bargain, and right now I just don't see how there could be any money that can be made in Webhosting. So, I'm curious; who do you use?

My account is hosted at Bluehost, where I have 4 gigs of space, 100 gigs of transfer a month, and no limits on the number of mail accounts and sub domains. I can host 6 fully qualified domains on this one account, with unlimited aliased subdomains. There are also several pre-installed scripts to choose from, several content management systems, and database connectivity via MySQL. I use it for my personal mail, host a personal domain, but mostly I just use it as an environment to test and learn.

I was talking to a colleauge in ITS about his personal webspace, and he said he uses and recommends Dreamhost. After looking it over, I might consider switching, or even just getting another account. He had something like 200 gigs of storage, and 2 TB of data transfer per month. As I'm writing this now I ask myself; could that be right? Not only that, as I understood him, you can host unlimited domains not just the six that I can from my Bluehost account. Powerful.

So I'm asking; what do you use? How much do you pay, and more importantly, what do you use it for? Now, if you serve your own pages, that's fine too, but I'm talking here to those who have purchased space commercially.

If you don't have your own space, my recommendation is that you should consider getting some. There is much value in having your own account, and maybe I'll write an article about that later. For now i'll leave it at this; even if you have access to Case's server, and have an outlet to test and store things personally, do the right thing and get your own space. You'll be glad you did.

Good luck on those Web projects over the break!

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10 Comments »
  1. I use WebFaction. When I first decided to get an account on a web host (so I could stop hosting my domain on my home DSL connection with dynamic IP address), I found the number of choices overwhelming. Some offered crazy limits like your ITS friend mentioned, while others seemed more realistic. From what I read about picking a hosting solution, the companies who offer crazy unlimited limits are sort of shady and you'll get a surprise if you actually try to reach those limits. Anyway, basically I just got tired of doing research and picked WebFaction because I read on a friend's blog that he used them and wasn't too disappointed with them. I think I pay $7.99 a month.

    Comment by mgh — December 13, 2006 @10:50 am

  2. I use The Geek Empire because I like to support locally owned businesses. In this case they are particularly local because it is operated by Case staff and alumni. When I have a question or need to expand my capacity they respond quickly. I find it reassuring to know that someone knowledgeable is there to answer my questions. This is not true of the folks at my ISP who like to ask me silly things like which version of Windows I am using—when my query is related to my shell account on their Linux box (to which I'm connecting from a Mac). Also, now that I use http://www.flickr.com for photos I've found that I don't run out of space on the server as quickly as I did in the past. Thus, I don't really need terabytes of space for $9.99 or whatever. What I really need is to find the time to update my sites and knock off some of the cobwebs that have been building up!

    Comment by Heidi Cool — December 13, 2006 @12:40 pm

  3. Wow! Those are some amazing storage and bandwidth stats. I use ICDSoft for my personal webapge. My cost is $6/month. For that amount I get: 1000 MB Storage 20 GB Data Transfer 15 Subdomains 5 Parked Domains FTP accounts - Web based mail - $5 new domain registration fee - etc. And while I don't get as much stuff for my dollar as other hosting services - I will never leave ICDSoft. Why? Customer Service. Ever problem or issue I ever had was solved within minutes. The support ticket system works in almost real time. I just reviewed the 42 tickets I submitted and nearly all were solved in less than 5 minutes. Here is one example: "Q: Dec 21 2004 03:43 dave : it appears that i've been hacked. http://websitename.com/weblog can you help me figure out how this happened? A: Dec 21 2004 03:45 Support54: Hello, The "hacker" was searching for worldwritable files on accounts on the server and was replacing them with the "This Site is Defaced" message. Apparently files on your account were worldwritable (permissions 666 or 777). You should examine all the files and change the permissions to 664 or 775, as appropriate. You need not use 777 or 666 permissions on our server anymore. We have started using SuExec on the server, which greatly improves the security and stability. This environment also executes scripts with the user credentials, instead of the Apache ones, so your scripts can access all your files and folders. We can restore your site from our backups, dated 10 and 17 Dec. Please advise which backup we shall use. Best Regards, Support" Now that's quality customer service.

    Comment by dave — December 14, 2006 @10:45 am

  4. I use Textdrive. Bought it back when they had a special. It was a one-time $400 fee, and I got lifetime webhosting. It included shell accounts and such and enormous bandwidth and storage. I can't remember the exact numbers, but I've never been close to hitting any of them. About a dozen sites run there. I've been happy with them. Sadly, they no longer seem to offer the $400/lifetime special. I've heard good things about Dreamhost from people I trust that use it, but I have no personal experience with them.

    Comment by Jeremy Smith — December 14, 2006 @3:29 pm

  5. That's pretty good. I've never really heard of the unlimited web hosting thing. I've always used DarkStar for web and shell hosting accounts.

    Comment by Jojo — May 30, 2007 @7:45 am

  6. I've been using a SLhost for over a year now after originally moving from a shared hosting account & haven't looked back. Being from Australia many of the shared hosts from the US are fairly slow for us so moving to a dedicated box has made a huge difference.

    Comment by Web Host Buzz — June 7, 2007 @1:18 am

  7. Hello.Try http://www.sabwebhosting.com .Cheap prices, interesting hosting plans.You can create your custom hosting plan.They use Plesk linux servers and Plesk windows server and are pretty fast.Many big companies treat you like dirt,because they rely on their big number of clients.With medium companies is better.Have a good day!

    Comment by Munteanu Claudia — July 21, 2007 @4:24 pm

  8. Since this entry was first posted I've used Dreamhost for two projects and have been quite pleased. Their control panels give a lot of control to the account holder, and between their Wiki and their user discussion groups it is easy to find answers before even thinking about calling support.

    Comment by Heidi Cool — July 22, 2007 @5:33 pm

  9. There's no such thing as 'unlimited' hosting, just 'unmetered', but with the amount of bandwidth and storage space on most accounts now, unless you have huge requirements (which would justify a virtual or dedicated server at much higher cost), you can pay less than $10 a month for a good host. I recommend Hostgator* for paid hosting, or HostMe123 for free hosting (or you can pay $7 to get rid of ads for the lifetime of your hosting account). (* aff link).

    Comment by Emma — August 7, 2007 @11:07 am

  10. Man, nice info, but you could get something more for cheaper price! But keep posting so that people will be informed! Thanks!

    Comment by CrayonWeb — August 22, 2007 @11:51 pm

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