Technobabble

Best Web Hosts?

Posted by on Mar 13, 2007 | 38 Comments

Anyone that’s been in the web site building game for any amount of time has accumulated a list of web hosting companies that rock … and a list of web hosting companies that are 180 degrees in the other direction. Whether you use cheap virtual web hosts or heavy-duty dedicated servers, you’re bound to have favorites … it’s time to share, my friends …

digitalspace.net is my personal favorite. They’re inexpensive (starting at just three bucks a month!) and when I’ve needed help with things, they’ve been both friendly and fast … perfect for the small websites that I often build for friends and fun.

Lets open it up to the Gnomieverse …

  • What’s at the top of your list of criteria to look for in a web host?
  • Who are your favorite web hosts?
  • What’s the most you want to pay to have your website hosted on a monthly or yearly basis?

[tags]best web host[/tags]

  • http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/ bwb

    Cool, maybe if you get a chance you could leave a review of them on our site?

    thanks, Ben

  • PO’d Patriot

    A list of companies would have been nice…

    Personally, I like Dreamhost.

  • http://www.geekbooks.com/ Dan Gray

    I’ve heard great things about Dreamhost, P.O.P. … I’m hoping that more folks will step up and crow about their favorite hosts!

  • SLawler

    Dreamhost without a doubt. For what Digital Space charges for 2GB you get 200 from Dreamhost. Same features. Tech support is quick to respond and they all speak English!

  • http://www.bwana.org Bwana

    Dreamhost. Despite their recent growing pains, I’ve been extremely happy with them for the past 2 or 3 years.

  • http://inner.geek.nz/ Brett Taylor

    Dreamhost is Great. Copious amounts of everything. Except: CPU time and excessive requests per second, and you can’t run your own persistant scriptns. Not many people need this stuff, so that’s great for your blog and your hosted 1gb video, but if you need that stuff, don’t look at Dreamhost.

  • http://corykrug.com Cory Krug

    Criteria:

    - Speed, bandwidth, storage, and doesn’t oversell any of these things Eg. if I need the bandwidth and regularly use it, they won’t complain.

    - Community. Textdrive (now Joyent) has an awesome geek-backed community.

    - Flexability. What can I do without hitting limitations. Eg. # of domains/websites, can I run Rails apps, PHP, can I change/add NS records, email spam filtering.

    Favorites so far: Mediatemple and Textdrive (Joyent). I recently moved from Textdrive to Joyent for the reason of the flexibility of their Dedicated Virtual servers verses others, and prices of other offerings. The geek community raving about their (dv) servers also helped :-)

  • http://www.abacuscomputerservicesonline.com Stan

    We use Dreamhost….
    Very good.

  • http://corykrug.com Cory Krug

    fyi, I meant that I moved from Textdrive/Joyent to Media Temple.. ooops.

  • http://www.veronicabelmont.com veronica

    laughing squid, of course!

  • http://www.cadco.com Cadco Systems

    We have been with Eden Hosting for years but have setup our new domains at TCQ.net who have been awesome! Great 24/7 support and knowledgeable techs!

  • http://www.thebrotherlove.com/ j. brotherlove

    I’m another Dreamhost fan. They’re not perfect; but their pricing and feature set are hard to beat.

  • http://photos.millardfam.com Matt Millard

    I’ve had great luck with Bluehost. They just get it.

  • http://thirdspherehosting.com/plus/?thirdbco&id=thirdbco&pkg= Jack Bremer

    I love thirdsphere hosting – amazing tech support, awesome fantastico control panel, and it’s only $24.95 per month for unlimited domains, 500MB webspace and 30gig transfer.
    On top of that, they give you $10 every month forever, for everyone you refer there, so you only have to refer three people and you start profiting from your webspace every month!

  • Neo Zheng

    ZipServers.com, I’ve been using a dedicated server there for a couple of years and have had excellent service!

  • http://www.the-daily-poll.com Rassi

    Another vote for Dreamhost… I’ve been with them since ’98 and while they’ve had a few bumps in the road, they offer more bang for your buck than anyone else I’ve found so far…

  • http://www.toddalbert.com Todd

    I’ve tried several hosts and kept coming back to Site5. They offer excellent service and support at the best prices in the business. I’m a happy long-term customer and I’ve turned some of my non-techie and techie friends on to Site5 and they are all happy, too.

  • Ziggie

    1 & 1 for me.

    They’re not the cheapest, but they’ve been the most reliable host I’ve ever had. The free domain(s) included in the package help (in my mind) offset the cost some.

  • http://www.1and1.com gab

    I second the 1and1.com nominee. I’ve never had any problems.

  • Mark Hill

    I’m on pair.com, which has been pretty good tech-support-wise, though their mail could be more reliable.

    When I saw so many votes for Dreamhost I thought I’d check it out. I immediately discovered that the dreamhost.com domain was on my porn block list. That association not exactly in keeping with the corporate image we’re looking for; I’ll shop elsewhere.

  • http://www.lunarpages.com/id/slackerjay Jason Wallwork

    I admit that I haven’t tried many but I found Lunarpages and have never looked back. Since I joined them a couple of years ago, never had issues and they’ve continually added features and space/transfer while keeping the same price – $6.95/month for 250 GB storage and 2500 GB transfer. Phone and email support. Only used email support but it’s been fast and helpful. They also include one free domain and you can have up to 10 with the one account. Just click on my name if you want to check them out.

    My criteria? I like Linux hosts so that’s the number one thing and in the case of the main site I have hosted on it, an absolute necessity (it’s a LUG). They also have to be fast and reasonably priced. I know that there’s probably cheaper out there but not sure I’d want to try it. I don’t have a credit card so they have to be able to accept payment via money order, cheque or paypal.

  • RD

    netpivotal were decent enough price and featurewise and far better than the competition in the UK in all aspects…

  • Nick

    Without doubt HostGator. Good, affordable, fast and willing to help. I have just moved four sites to them from a host who shall remain nameless (unless of course I’m asked).

  • http://www.salesforcewatch.com Mark

    FutureQuest – fanatical customer support and great customer forums!

  • http://www.site5.com Matt

    I moved to Site5 a few years ago and love their service. They’ve got some good customization to the common back-end apps like CPanel and WHM. They offer shell access with multi-domain hosting, and they also have their “Flashback” to restore previous versions of files right from the server.

    I still have some sites at totalchoicehosting.com as well, and they are still very good.

    Both of these hosts have good, helpful communities of staff and users, which is key.

  • Pingback: Diigo daily 03/22/2007 « Graham Perrin: fuzzy brained geek

  • Amber

    Another vote for Dreamhost – tons of space for $8.95 a month, unlimited domains, plenty of extras available including many one click installs.
    Very knowledgeable and responsive staff, an up-to-the-minute off-site status page have made me a contented customer for over 4 years.

    (did I mention they have a sense of humor? If you want to know the people you’re dealing with are real people and find out who they are, Dreamhost rocks)

  • http://www.jhave.net Jess Have

    Dreamhost and ICDsoft are both fantastic.

  • http://mkumm.com Michael Kumm

    NetworkRedux has been especially good over the last year (although prior to that there used to be a lot of down time). I also like RedwoodVirtual for certain things (VPS for like $10). I also have a budget account with MediaTemple. I had a few problems at first, but they seem to be getting better all the time.

  • Jesse

    I resell. So my design clients have a real person to call when things are a bit off. Someone who has control over everything. They don’t want to think about it, they pay me for that.

    I moved 27 clients from _____ to Site 5 in January of this year. Their tech support literally soars above the other 15 or so hosts I have worked with in the past, they give me plenty of space and bandwidth for a very reasonable cost. Unlimited sites and let me oversell my space and bandwidth if I chose to. (which I don’t). I think I’m paying $240/year for 100GB/monthly bandwidth and 15GB space. No doubt the deal is now better than that.

    As a reseller I have control right down to NS records, NS zone templates, cron jobs and the like as well as shell.

    Because they run PHP through a CGI wrapper I do have a wee bit of trouble. Just to change my ‘path’ i have to duplicate php.ini and put it in my root. Can’t use .htaccess for that. (small arggg)

    Besides that one tiny issue…. they kick butt. Especially techie ‘Vince S.’ The guy solves every problem when no one else knows how. He knows everything.

    They are not like other hosts I have had over the years, the do not say ‘can’t be done’. They always figure out a way and have solved issues I had for years with several other hosts in no time flat.

    For reselling, they get my thumbs up plus 4.
    And my clients don’t know it but they need that.

    And they have all the one click install stuff if your into that.

  • JR

    Well, I landed on SiteFlip a few years back and have enjoyed the features. I never seem to need tech support, so can’t rave about that. But the reliability is very, very good. I checked out some of the other hosting services mentioned. In my opinion, the only one worth re-mentioning is Site5. If something ever happened to make me move from SiteFlip, then I’ll be going to Site5. In fact, the only major difference that I can see is that SiteFlip does not support mailing lists , and that pound-for-pound (kind of hard to gauge because pricing schemes are so different) Site5 costs a bit more. For a personal site or a business site that doesn’t need mailing lists, keep SiteFlip in mind. If you need mailing lists, consider Site5 (though I still think you can find for much cheaper the same web hosting features as Site5 offers with disk and bandwidth options that will meet your needs). As for ThirdSphere… just as full-featured, but even more costly. Sheesh… the site reads like an infomercial! ;-)

  • http://www.sibi.cc Rob

    I’ve been very pleased with the unique mix of features offered by Westhost (westhost.com). I’ve tried a few other hosts but always end up longing for the level of control Westhost gives me over my accounts. Their virtual private server setup (on all plans) isn’t technically pure “root” access but it is very close and sufficiently “root” for just about every need I’ve ever had. 24/7 live chat tech support rocks too.

  • http://www.mincepieclub.co.uk/ Steve

    Here in Reading, UK we have been using a small reseller Web-Tastic (http://www.web-tastic.com). We have a fairly standard hosting account 200MB of space, PHP, MySQL, email, SPAM filter, etc.
    What is great is that we get good help / advice from ‘real’ people.

  • Andy

    Been using ICDSoft.com for a few years. No problems.

  • http://www.gnade.com/ Gerhard Ade

    webstrikesolutions.com has been hosting my sites for years. At $30 for the first year (that’s all!) and $8.50/mo after that, they are a bargain. However, there’s nothing “cheap” about their support.

  • http://www.bigpinkcookie.com Christine

    Amused to see so many Dreamhost recommendations considering all the Dreamhost former clients that I ended up hosting over the 5 years I was in the business. Interesting.

    I’m a huge, huge, HUGE fan of HostingMatters.com – they have been FANTASTIC to work with and I can not recommend them enough. They are wonderful to work with and the uptime is perfect.

  • http://www.topsecretsupport.com billy

    I use Godaddy and Dreamhost.

  • http://www.falgram.com Falmung

    Maybe they called it organic because its closest to seeing it in real life?