Web Hosting: Who do you suggest?
Where should I host my website? How much should I pay?
I’ve searched high, I’ve searched low, and pretty much every web hosting company has its ups and downs. If you’re starting up a company and you’re not sure how much traffic you’ll get, you should never spend over $10/mo! As far as hosting goes, I’ve tried powweb.com, netfirms.com, godaddy.com, and now I’m with DreamHost.com. Which one is the best! Well, for my needs, I’ve found that DreamHost is the best, but you may have different needs. These are the advantages that I’ve found:
DreamHost
Reasonable Price- $9.95/mo if you sign up for less than two years at a time, you can get it as low as $7.95/mo, too (two year subscription).
Lots of disk space and bandwidth - In their lowest plan ($9.95/mo) they give you something like 186gb of storage and 1.86tb of bandwidth. If you don’t know what the numbers mean, just say “wow” anyway.
Fast server connection - With most of the hosting services I’ve worked with, I’ve been unhappy with the slow speeds of downloading content from the servers (my clients were unhappy, too). Not with DreamHost, though. Their servers are quite speedy.
Unlimited domains and emails - For someone who does freelance web development, this is a must. I kept calling and arguing with netfirms (my last host) to allow me to pay them more so I could host more domains, but their largest package only allows you 35 or something. DreamHost gave me unlimited, now I’m happy.
Customize Everything - You can customize everything with them, from database names to webmail.
No shared SSL - This was upsetting. I had to purchase my own SSL to put shopping carts on my websites. I ended up getting everything done for as low as $50/yr, but that’s another $50. It was worth it for me, though.
One FTP user per Domain - Not a huge deal, but VERY annoying sometimes.
Overall: I would say they are the best, at least for my needs. I would recommend them to anyone. If you do sign up with them, use the promo code: IMBROKE to save you money.
Netfirms
Decently Priced - They have deals down to $5/mo if you’re not going to do much with it. You can also get free hosting that lasts for ever (with ad banners) I still have a domain hosted there for free since 1999 never paid a cent. They are an honest bunch of guys.
Shared SSL - Much better shared SSL setup than Powweb and it’s FREE!
Very User-Friendly control panel - I don’t know if it’s because I’ve used this one the longest or not, but I found that their control panel was very very easy to work with.
Very Very Slow Server Connection - So annoying and VERY upsetting. I had been with them for 4 years and after that the speed of the websites I hosted there started going extremely slow. After many many calls they said they couldn’t fix the problem. This was the #1 reason I left them. People will not wait!
Poor PHP support - I can’t tell you how many lame workarounds I had to write in PHP because of their server. PHP couldn’t even detect SSL connection!
Overall: Very promising at first, but I can’t see past the slow servers, sorry netfirms.
PowWeb
Inexpensive - I think when I did this one, I signed up for two years and got the third free and I only paid $7.50/mo for the two years I signed up for.
Shared SSL - It comes with a shared SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). This is a must if you’re running a website that takes credit cards.
Full PHP Support - They are the only web hosting company that I know of that supports PHP IMAP functions.
Confusing Control Panel - Their control panel is very difficult to use, I remember always spending more time than I should have trying to find out where to do things.
Unfriendly FTP Support - When setting up FTP (File Transfer Protocol), your ftp host is not ftp://yourdomain.com as it should be. It’s something like ftp://ftp09.powweb.com and it’s hard to remember when you’re using programs like filezilla (which is common because it’s free).
Must pay extra for additional ‘fully hosted’ domains - This means that when you want to host another domain with them, you have to pay extra if you want to have emails (even forwarding addresses) to the other domain.
Overall: good, but not for me, maybe if I only hosted a single domain, but who does that these days.