July 06, 2005

• I'm going to watch this thread with interest. My hosting company recently screwed me over as well: They somehow lost about a thousand user accounts when they upgraded me to a dedicated server. (Half my user base.) After a few days of waiting for them I give up and call, and during the call the entire database disappears. It didn't come up for 10 hours, and these hours are while I'm visiting San Francisco (from Germany) interviewing on the strength of my project on the site. Do not choose a hosting company based on price or features alone! Looking forward to recommendations from other monkeys...
• Well, I've been using Fatcow (fatcow.com) for several years, during which time I've had *one* instance of unscheduled down time, for about an hour or so. I've needed relatively little support, but I've found them to be friendly and responsive. In fairness, I haven't shopped around much- a friend recommended Fatcow to me, and I've never looked back- and I'm a pretty low-maintenance customer. That said, I couldn't recommend them more highly.
• Hey, wait a minute- 'wanderingSTAN'?! You're working MY side of the street, pal...
• I've been using Dreamhost for a year now... I run ten sites including a large phpBB board and don't regret it for a bit. For the bandwidth and price I'd say they're extremely competitive and deserve a look.
• Dreamhost..excellent service
• Hosting is so cheap right now that (like with purchasing electronics) your main concern should not be price. Computers are complicated - stuff always goes wrong. Good tech support is absolutely crucial. I use A Small Orange. Their tech support is great - submit a question and get a knowledgeable response the next day. The prices are very good and overage charges are reasonable - only fifty cents a gigabyte. Check them out. (Incidentally - their prices are quite good)
• I forgot to mention that a crucial element is if they permit Adult content; it narrows the field considerably.
• You're in luck with Dreamhost... they say specifically no child porn, no libel, and no warez, and "other than this, go crazy!"
• Depends on the service and features you want, but I've had good experiences with Textdrive and for a smaller sort of operatiion (i.e. not quite virtual hosting) Cornerhost.
• Dreamhost. No question about it.
• Probably not the best for you, but BGF Web is great for smaller sites. The cheapest package I've ever found ($30/year for 100mb and 1.5gb bandwidth) and I've had a good experience with their support.
• If you go Dreamhost, put promotion code 777 in (if they still do it). You'll save around $120 and pay like $10 for an entire year of service. It's an excellent plan too (and I really like the company, doesn't give that evil vibe that places like Godaddy have lately).
• I forgot to mention the plan is the "Crazy Domain Insane" plan for 12 months. And it looks like they indeed still use that promotion code.
• Midphase does say they accept adult content, but they seem sort of...grudging about it. And the stuff about segregating adult sites onto a separate server, while it could be just for purposes of bandwidth management, somehow strikes me as wanting to treat the adult sites as second-class. If I were hosting adult content, I think I'd seek out a hosting company with an attitude towards it more like Dreamhost's. And yes, I've used Dreamhost for other sorts of sites and have been happy with them.
• I have been using Dreamhost for years, and I still don't know of anything better, but I have to say that the service has declined a bit in the last two years; I fear that the company has just gotten too big and popular to maintain the kind of service they had earlier in the decade. I have had numerous billing problems since 2003. They would have been minor irritations if I had not been on such a careful budget, but I was, so they were not minor to me. They have resulted in outages that basically occurred because Dreamhost didn't bill me the correct amounts at the correct times. Keep an eye on this, if you use them and are on a budget... make sure the amount they're billing you is the amount they should be billing you, and if not, be aware that another bill will show up within a month or so of when you've paid the first one. Also, just in the last few months, they did the autorenewal of my domain, which of course I would have wanted regardless. They send you several notifications that your domain will be renewed. Fine? Fine. Except that a month after the renewal, I got a bill for it, with the note attached, "Not free anymore." (Domain registration was free with the Crazy Domain Insane plan for several years, starting several years after I began hosting with them.) This really aggravated me, only because I hadn't heard of the change in service and the fact that they were actually SCALING BACK features they'd added. I'm also pretty aggravated that, as a longtime customer, I'm now paying them $150/yr-ish, while new customers can still use that 777. I kind of feel that I'm paying for others to have that discount with the scale-back of the free registration feature. So I recommend them with those caveats.
• This does not help MoneyJane, but I will comment in general. I have gone through probably 8 webhosts over the past 10 years. I run my WinNT server with The Planet / ServerMatrix and do not think I will ever leave. But you have the whole server, not shared webhost. MonkeyFilter.com lives at The Planet too. I also have a VC account, for my PHP-based sites, with TextDrive. They also run their servers at The Planet's DC in Dallas. These are shared webhosted sites and they are tops in doing services right. Plus it helps the development community. For service and bottom-line cost, these two cannot be beat.
• Your current host seems a little pricey for what they offer, the 750 megs disk space is especially chintzy, given how cheap space has become. As for the second bunch, I'm always a little leery of hosts that advertise "unlimited" or "unmetered" anything. Sure, it's "unlimited" until you get the email saying you've exceeded what they think is reasonable, and they hold your site for ransom until you cough up more money. Unless you're using something that absolutely requires hosting on a Windows box, it's been my experience that *nix hosts tend to be cheaper and more stable. Looking at your current host, I see they charge the same, but many that offer both are cheaper, and it is more stable.
• Tophosts.com has a monthly Top 25 ranking of hosts I used them to pick out my web host a couple years ago: Hostway (currently #3 on the list). I'd recommend them although my website is very vanilla.
• I recommend Dreamhost as well. I have not had any major issues, service or billing related. However, verbminx's advice is good - it does feel like they've gotten a bit too big.