OK, so I need a host for the site of the company I'm starting up. I already got the domain (and it currently points to a placeholder "coming soon" message hosted in a friend's server), but I need to look around for a good host - if I'm going to pay I don't want to get screwed up.

First I looked in Namecheap since I noticed they had hosting in addition to domain (my domain is registered with them). I calculated, and one year of the cheapest plan (which will do for now, I'll upgrade later if needed) costs $47.40 ($3.95 per month), and includes e-mail hosting as well as PHP and MySQL support, as well as unlimited bandwidth. The disk space is small, but considering the next tier has more space than what I have free in this computer... (and again, if I start needing that space then at that point I can afford to upgrade probably) Another downside is that since it's the same company that hosts the domain, if an issue arises in one end I can potentially be screwed in both places. On the upside, live support seemed to work fine =P (went there to ask one question regarding billing)

Somebody told me to check Hostgator, but it's quite more pricey, though it does seem to provide more features (though as I said, what I would get with Namecheap is enough for me for now). Also this guy told me he heard they were good a couple of years ago, but I have no idea if that still holds true today.

Does anybody have a better idea about what hosting services are out there? I want something that's reliable.

What I care about:

• Service is good, don't throw me something that is prone to issues =P
  
• PHP and SQL (I don't care about other frameworks right now)
  
• Ideally good support for e-commerce stuff (since I need to sell stuff)
  
• Unlimited bandwidth
  
  What I don't care about:
  
  
  • Disk space (as long as it's reasonable enough for a site, some small games (in terms of filesize), a forum and a database with user information)
    
  • Python, Ruby, etc. (I'm going to use PHP, I don't care what other people say - I avoid the ugly stuff anyway)
    
    Hoping that here are people who know about good hosts, none of the people I know do =P

I've been burned too many times on shared hosting. They all seem to have periods of no issues, and then failures left and right. For anything serious, I'm springing for "cloud" hosting through amazon or azure. For the rest I have a linode VPS that I put everything on.

It depends on what you actually want to achieve, you get what you pay for, and for those websites that say 5.95$/month unlimited space and bandwidth! Its actually BS read the fine print and you will find alot of clauses that would prevent you from getting those things. If you plan on moving alot of data around then web hosting I would say is off the question.

You then have 2 (3) options, VPS and a dedicated server (as well as cloud hosting). A dedicate server will give you the most control because you actually control the box itself so you dont have to worry about sharing a machine with others that might be hogging up your bandwidth, memory or processing speed. But they are also more expensive and not that expandable. Now Virtual machines you still are sharing a machine but you do have your own dedicate space that the other machines cant touch.

I havent played around with cloud hosting so I can speak on that.

I would honestly probably get a cheap VPS and upgrade it over time if traffic required it. Customer support for Hostgator is actually really good, they are slightly pricier but they take good care of you from my own expriences. I've also been looking into myhosting since they seem to have good reviews and prices.

[Edit] If you just need a website and dont plan on delivering any heavy content then web hosting could probably be fine initially, but because you put an emphasis on ulimitted bandwidth it sounds like it might be content intensive.

I've been happy with Dreamhost, they run around $9.00/mo.

Beware of two-bit micro-hosts. I used one that was run by a friend of a friend, and it was nothing but trouble. They switched payment forms at one point, and my payment got directed to the old way; I was charged for a year's hosting + domain renewal, but because they didn't get the reciept from the old system, they failed to renew my domain (which was promptly snapped up by a domain squatter who didn't respond to my inquiries about getting it back) and I lost it for a year, *and* they kept billing me for monthly charges on the new billing system.

When I realized what had happened months later (as my site was clearly out of frequent use) and I contacted the company, he refused to refund or offer any help, saying that it was my fault for failing to bring it up sooner (a not unreasonable statement, but poor business at least) -- actually, he did "helpfully" offer to consult on proceeding with filings to reacquire the domain for $500...

I know that owning my own server is really the best (and probably only reasonable) option, but I'm on a tight budget and I'm trying to see where I can save money. Also I don't have that much experience in setting up servers =P (I have some friends that can help me with that, not to mention server documentation, but it's still a hassle, especially with stuff that loves to be stubborn)

I suppose now somebody will argue that if I can't pay a good VPS I can't afford to do what I want anyway...

I would honestly probably get a cheap VPS and upgrade it over time if traffic required it.

And we're in the same boat, I have no idea what would be a good VPS service (remember that I still don't get control over uptime, and if hardware fails I have no way to deal with it immediately, short of getting multiple VPSes and get them to make up for each other, at which point I may as well buy my own server hardware if I can afford to pay for that). So I'd still need to ask.

Customer support for Hostgator is actually really good, they are slightly pricier but they take good care of you from my own expriences. I've also been looking into myhosting since they seem to have good reviews and prices.

Nice to know the info doesn't seem out of date then (though for the record, they're one of those $5.95/mo hosts you mentioned =P).

[Edit] If you just need a website and dont plan on delivering any heavy content then web hosting could probably be fine initially, but because you put an emphasis on ulimitted bandwidth it sounds like it might be content intensive.

You'd be surprised how easy it's to run out of bandwidth. The stuff I'm going to make available to download is a some (a few tens in the worst case?) MBs (something that would be considered small by today's standards), but get 1,000 people downloading that stuff in a month and suddenly you get that same number in GBs. From there it isn't hard to see how you can hit the monthly bandwidth limit unless it's measured in many TBs at least.

If you ask, I'd rather have limited hard disk space and unlimited bandwidth than a lot of space but limited bandwidth. I can deal with having a low amount of space (I already do that with my computer anyway!), but I'd prefer not having the site shut down for surpassing a bandwidth limit (especially since such a thing would most likely last for days, which is really bad - even service failure is better since it won't last that long).

Now, I don't expect a huge amount of people downloading stuff (at least not at first) but I do certainly expect a sizable amount (certainly more than 1,000 in a month =P). It's also true I'm going to expect a lot of users downloading that stuff from third-party services (as I may make that stuff available elsewhere), so maybe I'm just overestimating and it isn't that serious.

Also, I'm talking about the site once it's in full activity. Right now I can just get away with a small site that just has information. But I'd rather avoid having to switch hosts (upgrading isn't the same as outright having to move).

I've been happy with Dreamhost, they run around $9.00/mo.

I'll go check that I guess (the more hosts I can check the better).

You'd be surprised how easy it's to run out of bandwidth. The stuff I'm going to make available to download is a some (a few tens in the worst case?) MBs (something that would be considered small by today's standards), but get 1,000 people downloading that stuff in a month and suddenly you get that same number in GBs. From there it isn't hard to see how you can hit the monthly bandwidth limit unless it's measured in many TBs at least.

Any reason why you need to host those files on the same provider as the website itself? Amazon S3 prices are very reasonable and you're paying for actual usage, not potential usage.

For shared hosting, the best I've had so far is HostGator. They really do a good job at keeping things up and running and their customer service is very helpful. I've never run anything more extensive than a blog on HostGator though -- and it doesn't really eat up too much bandwidth. What the other guys are saying about "unlimited bandwidth" is pretty much true though: it's a myth most of the time. You WILL start having problems when you begin eating up a lot of bandwidth on shared hosting. Some hosts are better about it than others, but eventually you'll start to have problems.

A while back I was looking at potentially creating a Python/Django web app that was going to be streaming audio to users, and I was looking into Linode VPS as I had heard great things about them. Definitely give them a look -- it's not as cheap as what you seem to be looking for but their lowest plan starts at 19.95/mo and you can scale up very easily if need be. It's a very affordable price for a great package.

But really -- unless if you have a VERY aggressive promotional/advertising campaign that is going to bring in thousands of interested visitors every month, I wouldn't worry that much about getting a crazy amount of bandwidth just yet. The main thing is that you need to have an "upgrade plan" for when heavier traffic does start to come in and you don't want any downtime.

I haven't looked too much into cloud hosting but it sounds like hosting on the cloud offers some significant advantages (next to zero downtime, easy scaling capabilities) over both VPS and shared hosting so you should definitely look into that. If you don't need any physical control over the server but you want the ability to scale up your resources on-demand, the cloud might be your best bet.

Gee, at this rate it seems I shouldn't settle for anything less than buying my own servers -_-' Or at least dedicated servers (not VPS since they're shared hosting!), and even then bandwidth issues may arise since it's still eating their network connection (just not sucking up other resources from the other sites).

And my problem with cloud hosting is that I don't like any of the companies providing those services - unless there's a not-so-well-known company out there that I don't know about, not like I know much about that stuff =P

EDIT: WTF -_- gets an emoticon =/

Also just to make it clear: when do hosting companies actually complain about bandwidth use? When it's high overall or when there are sudden usage peaks (as opposed to being evenly scattered)? Because I doubt I'm going to have massive peaks.

[quote name='Sik_the_hedgehog' timestamp='1341954784' post='4957789']
You'd be surprised how easy it's to run out of bandwidth. The stuff I'm going to make available to download is a some (a few tens in the worst case?) MBs (something that would be considered small by today's standards), but get 1,000 people downloading that stuff in a month and suddenly you get that same number in GBs. From there it isn't hard to see how you can hit the monthly bandwidth limit unless it's measured in many TBs at least.

Any reason why you need to host those files on the same provider as the website itself? Amazon S3 prices are very reasonable and you're paying for actual usage, not potential usage.
[/quote]

OOooo this seems really nice I think ill read into this.

[Edit] Actually.... I dont know where I might of gone wrong in the math... but for a VPS in myhosting.com they charge you 10$ a month extra for 3 terabytes of information. Mean while I calculated the cost of amazon and 3 terabytes of data transfer cost you 360$!!! with them.... thats a HUGE difference

Also, cloud hosters like Heroku are good too. You can even develop entirely in the cloud with cool new stuff like Cloud9 so that you can develop from anywhere from any platform.[s] They both support node.js by default, so you can get easy high performance[/s] oops, saw you were more towards X-AMP type setups.

[background=rgb(250, 251, 252)][Edit] Actually.... I dont know where I might of gone wrong in the math... but for a VPS in myhosting.com they charge you 10$ a month extra for 3 terabytes of information. Mean while I calculated the cost of amazon and 3 terabytes of data transfer cost you 360$!!! with them.... thats a HUGE difference [/background]

[/quote]

3 TB of storage or 3 TB of bandwidth? There is a big difference there.