Res ipsa loquitur

I despise GoDaddy's control panel interface. I find it really hard to use, and it's covered in ads trying to get you to BUY MORE FEATURES. (One of the businesses I do a little web work for is hosted there. I am agitating to move it.)

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Dreamhost is an excellent host, but relatively expensive, IMHO.

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ancientsavvy.livejournal.com

Wow, I must have been using some very expensive hosts over the years, because I was jumping for joy at the prices at Dreamhost. :-) Even if there are cheaper ones out there I'm not moving unless something catastrophic happens. I've moved all my sites so many times due to host issues in the past, I've found a stable one and I'm sticking with it! :-)

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The things you need to look at:

1) Disk space and bandwidth limits - and what it will cost you if you go over. However, depending on what you will need the site for, you may need a very small amount of both, and it's silly to pay for lots. You might be able to find a very small, very cheap plan through a reseller, if you don't need much. Note that you will also need SQL support for many of the content management system front-ends, so make sure that you have this if you want to use this kind of software (as opposed to a simple html set of pages).

2) One-click or easy installs of software you might want to use. Things like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and so on - content management systems, shopping cart systems, etc. Dreamhost is one of the best for this; Netfirms, which I use for Hieroglyfics, has a small but fairly good set of stuff that you can install easily. GoDaddy has this as well, maybe even more options, but they edge toward the "stuff that costs you to run and install, and let us sell it to you!" side of things.

3) Interface. Dreamhost's is excellent, and Netfirms's is pretty darn good. I hate GoDaddy's flashy, ad-filled interface that makes it impossible (for me) to find the stuff I want.

4) Support. Dreamhost's is excellent. Netfirms sucks at this. GoDaddy sucks at this.

I hope this helps!

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lilac-way.livejournal.com

I use doteasy.com $50 per year. It works for us, but looking at Isis's comment, my response is "buh?" to all the technical stuff.

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thegrrrl2002.livejournal.com

Anti-recs: NEIT Solutions and Hostway. It's taken me six months to sort out a billing dispute with NEIT, and I needed the help of the Better Business Bureau to even get a response out of them. Help tickets, emails, and vm messages (no humans answering the phone) all were ignored. I had to cancel my credit card to prevent further charges. Hostway? Not quite as bad, but overpriced. And truly abysmal customer service. I loved the time they marked all my fellow co-workers emails (all from the same service) as spam and hid them in our spam folders. It took a week for us to figure out where the emails were disappearing to. Their own marketing newsletter gets marked as spam, too, to my endless entertainment.

I will be switching soon, and my on-line research seems to indicate that HostGator is the current favorite among users. I will be switching to them next month.

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catmoran.livejournal.com

I don't think Dreamhost's prices can be beat for the bandwidth and disk space you get.

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ecaterin.livejournal.com

I can't recommend Servage.net enough. I have my hosting through them and have designed 3 websites for friends and used them as well. At 6.45 a month it should be a crappy site with no customer service.

Instead it's a fantastic site with TONS of customer service, a lot of built in scripts (meaning you can instantly install many different things - shopping cart, bulletin boards, a dozen other things - wiki's, image galleries, content management systems, you name it (http://www.servage.net/page/auto-installer/)). And lots and lots and lots of space and bandwidth - 510 GIGS of space (yes, you read that right) and 5010 gigs of monthly bandwidth usage.

I've had almost no down time in 3 years. I was set up and live within an hour of every account I bought for myself and others. The domain name you buy with the account IS FREE.

No ads. No bullshit. Great customer service. Everything WORKS, all the time.

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jood.livejournal.com

I've had great service from Hostmonster, and not a minute of downtime for the last two years. I spend $10 a year for excellent personal site and email hosting. The online control panel is easy to use, and it is crazy cheap.

http://www.hostmonster.com/

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isilya

Dreamhost is way too unreliable for a business site that needs to be up more than 80% of the time, however, which is a shame considering that it really does have great one-click installers, documentation and easy to understand control panel.

I would say that my Dreamhost account has problems about 30% of the time, over the past three years I've been with them; "problems" ranging from inaccessibility, slowdown, or (currently!) unreliable FTP connection.

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I second all that was said about dreamhost and add a few things:

I use them and like them, personally but the more time passes the more I encounter people with semi-horror stories about Dreamhost. For one thing, they have so many instances of Wordpress blogs and sites running that most of them end up really slow if they're not using caching technology (with plugins and the like): the databases and servers run slow because Dreamhost packs them to the gills, or so I heard.

Secondly, a lot of interesting applications and newer CMS like to run on the Ruby on rails framework, and DH's support of that is sketchy.

I have recently heard very good things about http://www.a2hosting.com/, which practices much of the same prices as DH (for less of the exuberant space and transfer that DH is renowned for, but the thing is, DH uses these impossible-to-reach limits as bait, and you'll never need them). A2 hosting also has very good support of Ruby, and they use the more classical cpanel interface that many hosting companies use and that many people know (if you're not already familiar with that, for you, getting used to this one or to the unique dreamhost interface is the same effort).

I don't think all the installs on A2 are as one-click easy-peasy as DH, but I don't know, really.

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Huh. While I was with DH I think I had only a very few problems. I'd say, like, 1% of the time. I wonder whether it's related to you being in Australia vs me being on the same continent as DH?

(I would still be with DH if it wasn't for our incompatability on the hosting of copyrighted files. :-)

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akite.livejournal.com

When I said no ads I meant on your webpage once you get it set up. I found GoDaddy less obnoxious than say, geocities, which I know is not saying much.

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Heh. What I mean is: See my recs site (http://hieroglyfics.net/recs)? That was put together with Wordpress, which on Netfirms is installed by going to the control panel and clicking the "Wordpress" button. (Well, it's a little more complex, in terms of configuration and making it pretty, but pretty much.) To run something like this, which has a database behind it, you need SQL. Any hosting plan will tell you if it includes SQL.

Most webhosts have varying levels of plans. For example, Netfirms (which I use) has plans for ~$5, $9, and $13 a month (http://www.netfirms.com/web-hosting/) - and honestly, I can't imagine needing more than what's available with the cheapest plan, here! (Except I really like having shell access, and I got my hosting through a special deal, so I have the mid-range plan.)

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ausmac.livejournal.com

I cant advise you on a US host of course, but my own experience here is that the most important thing is the backup, the support. That's probably obvious, but I signed my sister's small business up for a webhost which looked good (and is, pricewise) but they are shit lousy at responding to any emailed support questions, and it takes ages to get through on the phone for support.

My suggestion - if you see a host you like, maybe email a couple of the businesses already using them and find out just how good they are at providing support to their customers, and responding to problems.

Also, ask about downtime, and how often they have problems with their site.

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riverlight.livejournal.com

Well, I've not had to do any of the design or interfacing with our webhost, as the website we have for work was already set up by the time I got there—but we use alentus (http://www.alentus.com/) for it, and I've got to say, I love them, strictly on the basis of their customer service. Every single time I call, I get a live human being on the other end of the phone—and no waiting, either, ever. That to me is invaluable.

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I'll take a look at it. This post is showing me that there are a lot more options than I thought!

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Well, keep an eye on the comments. Apparently lots of our imaginary friends have already solved this problem for their own purposes.

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The green company thing is cool. If I go with them, I'll be sure to use your link.

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Thanks -- this is very thorough. Unfortunately I only understood about ten words of it.

Note that you will also need SQL support for many of the content management system front-ends, so make sure that you have this if you want to use this kind of software (as opposed to a simple html set of pages).

This relates to databases and/or shopping carts, right? I don't expect to need those; it's a pretty straightforward site, just advertising and articles, probably less than ten pages all told.

Things like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and so on - content management systems, shopping cart systems, etc.

Wordpress is blogging, yes? which at the moment I don't need. And content management sounds like it's relevant if you have so many pages that it's inefficient to update each one, and they're similar enough to use a template?

I wish I had some way to predict how much bandwidth I'm going to need; I suspect it's going to be extremely small, but it's hard to predict. I *hate* to click on a link and get that "bandwidth exceeded" error message.

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Mine too. When I feel too technologically illiterate, I just talk to the spouse, because I can say to him, "Which browser are you using?" and he'll answer, "What's a browser?"

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This is very useful -- thanks!

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Cool! Thanks. That's an excellent price.

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$10 a year?? That's amazing.

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I'm guessing that Ruby is way beyond what I'm going to need, since I'm not even really clear on what it is. I'll look into a2.

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See, it's not obvious -- it would never have occurred to me that I might need support, but of course I will.

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I'm getting the customer service thing from a lot of people, and it's good, because for some reason that part had never occurred to me.

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If your site is just going to be ten pages of html articles and no shopping cart type things, you don't need much bandwidth at all. Look at it this way: my website - 200 or so stories in html, and a few graphics, and the occasional mp3 and vid (which is big) - gets around 200 hits/day and uses on the order of 6GB/month of bandwidth. I can't imagine that you are going to use even that much. You will be just fine with a tiny, cheap plan.

ETA the cheapest plan from my host offers 500GB/month of bandwidth!

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ecaterin.livejournal.com

Yup :) It's the kind of site/space/service/bandwidth/features you'd expect for 35-45 a month :) I was led to the site 3 years ago by a fanfic author who has used Servage for about 6-7 years now and has the same report - great service, great up-time.

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The thing is, Ruby is a framework - you personally might never touch it, but there are applications that could be really cool which you might want to install someday, that's all I meant. like for example, I'm using this personal simple wiki-type thing called luminotes on the original hosted service at luminotes.com, and if I wanted I could download the software for it and host my own version of it somewhere - but I need the right framework for it, and dreamhost does not have it. :)

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I concur on this! I both like and dislike dreamhost, for the pricing and space and ... performance issues.

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Wordpress is primarily a blogging engine but like many other blogging engines it belongs to the wider category of 'CMS' because, well, your blogging content qualifies as content.
WP is very useful to build websites even if you do not have need of a blog per se, simply because it's a good way to apply an easy system of templates to your content (and be able to change the look on a whim, or add a category of content, or create hierarchical pages, etc), and it gives you a way to edit said content online without having to FTP any edited pages again to put it online.
There are many ways to make a website and WP is not automatically the best for your project, of course; I just mean that there's no reason to dismiss a very easy, flexible solution because you know it for a primary use (blogging) that you might not need it for. Like a knife can work for stubborn tape as well as soft cheese, you know? A good tool is versatile. :D

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wyoming-knott.livejournal.com

I'm currently on slashcity, but I'm looking to change. Yeah, sc's 'tiny' plan is affordable ($24/year) but it is *tiny*. I can't even host photos with the space I've got.

So I'm um... keeping an eye on this post. My plan at slashcity renews in July. Time to shop.

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I'm getting lots of good advice here. Also, I've asked the Tech Goddess to ask her son for advice; if he says anything that no one here mentioned, I'll post about it.

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orihara-kaoru.livejournal.com

Another DreamHost rec. I've been with them for over seven years, and I've never experienced any problems (I'm in Canada). Granted, my site is simple and tiny, and I'm currently using it as more of an external hard drive than anything else.

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