Do they use Linux only? I only want Linux hosting, and mixed providers are always trying to push you over into Windows hosting because they're being incentivized to do so. I've been around and don't need to hear that pitch again.

Effectively unlimited domains, bandwidth, storage and MySql databases, email accounts, FTP accounts - multiple user accounts I can lock down to one domain or folder for these because I might want to job out management for a domain or subdomain. Because I never know today what I'm going to be using it for, and this is a long term relationship that's challenging to get out of.

Cheap domains - under $15 a year. As many as you want on one hosting account, because I collect them as a hobby.

PHP, Perl and Python of course.

Ease of migration away. I figure if there's a button on their interface to release my domains to another registrar they'll try and keep me with good service rather than difficult migration.

Reasonable policies about certificates and dedicated IP addresses. Because I might want to open a store.

Reasonably easy and flexible setup of web apps, because I might want to run a package. Self-help configuration because I'm always fiddling with things after business hours.

I like BlueHost. No, I don't work for them but they've been making me happy for quite a while.

You're going to run a *chan site..

I've had great luck with http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ [nearlyfreespeech.net] - they're security-conscious, anti-spam, pay-only-for-what-you-use, and I like their political pro-privacy and pro-free speech stance. I have a feeling most of the people here at Slashdot would be very comfortable with them. They run FBSD, not Linux, but it's really not that huge a difference for web development.

Make sure you read the caveats about what will and won't work with their service. Things like Django and RoR won't really work because of the need for a persistent process, and they don't yet have support for cron jobs (but they're working on it - it's difficult because of the way they're set up). OTOH, MVC frameworks for PHP like CodeIgniter will work just fine, and they've got Catalyst installed for Perl coders. They do make it very clear about what they do and don't support, though.

I currently use 2 hosting companies for various things:
1st - BlueHost.com
I have the best things to say about BlueHost.com
No affiliation, other than very happy with the service and support.

2nd - Tech.coop
Unlimited!

The last one I want to mention is:
PriorityColo.com
http://prioritycolo.com/ [prioritycolo.com]

Why? Because they have the balls to tell "big shot lawyer companies" to STFU when they send shaky take-down notices.

Hope that helps! =)

It probably doesn't apply to either of your projects, but if you're starting from scratch, Google App Engine [google.com] might be a good candidate. Advantages: Starts out free, and it's by Google, so yes, it scales. When you have to start paying, it's pay-as-you-go like Amazon, but only for the cycles you actually use, since it's an entirely managed solution.

Like I said -- probably doesn't apply. It won't run PHP (that I know of), and mrstrano didn't specify what his shiny new app is being developed in. But if it's early enough, and if you're willing to trust Google...

I've moved around Web hosts a few times for similar reasons, most of which amount to general incompetence on the part of the hosts. Often the host would start out fine, seem great, and then after a while the outages, increased latency, and other problems would mount. By the time I found myself getting in touch with the host's tech support regularly, I would realize how bad it really was. Eventually I felt I had no choice but to go elsewhere, and I was back in the same boat as before. I've come to believe that's just life when you're not willing to pay a lot for Web hosting.

...so I use Hosting Matters [hostmatters.com]. Been using them for years, they're cheap, provide MySQL and cpanel access, sftp, and ssh (if you ask). Their rates are reasonable, and -- bonus -- every time I've filed a help ticket, I've gotten a response in hours*, and it's always been knowledgeable.

*Once it took 12 hours (essentially overnight) and the support rep apologized for taking so long.

Your hosting company must offer 24x 7 telephone support. If they do not, go elsewhere.

They must offer full access via SSH. Obviously PHP, MySQL, unlimited email accounts and as much bandwith as possible is also required.

I'd also recommend you register your domain names with a registrar unrelated to your hosting provider, so you can quickly and easily swap hosts.

I use godaddy for domain names, and liquidweb for hosting. Both are large enough not to disappear overnight, and are very responsive to queries.

Good thing you had back ups. Right?

I have had a good experience with DreamHost [dreamhost.com]. Their support is snappy and helpful, and the people who work there seem generally kind. They have a fine set of dreamhost-specific howtos maintained on their wiki, and a powerful but easy to use panel for administration.

They run linux boxes with the full complement of command line tools (with compilers and everything!), and the only restriction is no persistent processes. If you want to do that, you can buy their pricier private server option which gives you your own private server instance.

They have some great terms of use (as far as storage and bandwidth are concerned), and their prices are reasonable. I got a great deal a while back on two years of hosting, and now I'm hooked on the service.

Good support. It seems obvious to me, but anyway....

I had two Movable Type sites hosted at two different companies At the first one suddenly my PHP includes broke. I went back and forth with them for a week with them denying any knowledge or problems, and ended up having to rewrite the includes. No matter how many times I explained to them that I'd made no changes, the answer was the same...

A couple of months later the same thing happened at the second one. Five minutes after emailing support they told me the default on allow_url_include had changed, and they reactivated it for my install.

The difference was astonishing. A one week argument versus a five minute fix.

(Yes, I generally try to avoid URL Includes these days, though I still like them because they make code portable..)

Hoo boy, the stories I could tell. Actually, I can't, because the hosting provider threatened to sue us if we named them publicly.

OK, first, if there's more than a couple of servers involved, and your business depends on it, use two or more different providers. If you only have one provider, it puts them in a position to screw you. When we terminated our relationship with our provider, they held our data hostage until we paid them an additional $15,000 to put our servers on line again long enough for us to copy our data.

Which brings us to: DO YOUR OWN BACKUPS. Service providers either don't do them, or they don't do them right. The world is full of horror stories of customers paying the data center extra for backups, and then finding the backups were never actually done. And even if they do do backups, they maintain control of them, which puts them in a good position to extort you.

Remember, the practice of holding your data hostage goes back a long way. Happened to my father's company back in the 70's mainframe days. It still happens.

Most important of all: have a professional go over your data center contract with a fine-tooth comb. The default contract they'll give you (or at least the one they gave us) is highly abusive.

For instance: if you don't explicitly terminate a contract at the end of its period, it's automatically renewed for another 18 months. You need to give 2 months notice before the end of the term before canceling. There is no early termination. If you so much as upgrade a single disk drive, the contract is automatically renewed for another 18 months.

Here's a doozy: our contract specified that if a server went down, they would either fix or replace it within two hours of determining the problem. The catch: they merely have to say that they haven't determined the problem yet, and then they don't have to replace anything. Our main server was kept off-line for a month this way.

I like slicehost for a number of reasons, but you have to be willing to use a command line because there is no GUI unless you install one (because you're getting a virtual server with full root access).

Though they do not offer cpanel or anything like that, they do have a minimal admin panel that you can use to configure DNS, MX and set up your server (as well as automate backups, which start at like 5 a month or so).

For 20 a month, you get a 256mb ram virtual slice and around a dozen linux distros you can select from with their admin panel for the slice. If you dont like any of the ones they provide (very unlikely) you can opt to install your own with a set of directions they provide on their wiki (the wiki is also very helpful when setting up your server for whatever you might want to do).

Whenever I need help with a server issue, they email fairly quick (same day) or they have a chat room with people who actually speak English as their first language (or know it well enough you would assume they do). Generally, the people helping you are the same ones who maintain their website or their servers as well, not outsourced help.

Some dont like that they dont have any sort of guaranteed uptime, but eh, I've never really had any servers I have go down for more than an hour or so and it's generally sometime at night if they do. The downtime is generally planned or even if its an emergency, they notify with enough time you can migrate files to another server.

For 20 a month and the freedom of having full server access to install what you want, I'd gladly pay. I still loath when I have some clients who only want to pay 3-5 or whatever a month at some lame shared hosting site and have to deal with cpanel or whatever else, because once you've used the command line and had full control on a remote server it's hard to go back to the panel interface, lol.

Things to avoid tend to be better indicators than things to go for. I'd avoid:

* Companies that aren't open about issues. If there isn't a public forum, status RSS feed, status twitter account, etc. BAD NEWS
* Companies that offer unlimited anything. By definition, unlimited means that they are overselling and while things may be great now, they'll suffer in the long run
* Linux hosts that don't give you SSH access. CPanel/Fantastico/Whatever do plenty of things, but there is no substitute for having shell access
* Anything at all that makes you feel funny. There are _plenty_ of options out there and if something doesn't feel right, you're better off going somewhere else.
* Companies that won't respond to you personally for pre-sales questions. When I was looking for colo space, this turned out to be the most important factor. The better they communicate with you before they have any of your money, the better off things will be in the long run.
* Anything that seems to be too good to be true. i.e. If you have a need for a lot of disk/bandwidth/cpu, and "unlimited" is $5/month, BAD NEWS

I run ithought dot org and host a reasonable number of sites, and try to adhere to all of the above. One thing you won't be able to find out easily with hosts is something I do: I won't accept customers that seem like they aren't a fit for the hardware I have. Shared hosting is what it is and if a customer is going to drive up the load on servers such that it affects other customers, but doesn't want to pay for dedicated hardware or a VM, their actions shouldn't hurt other shared hosting customers that are only using a very small amount of resources.

Most of the cloud stuff is plenty nice if you want to manage it (S3, SliceHost, etc) but don't underestimate what is involved with keeping server OSs up to date, tuned, and monitored. If you're core competency isn't tweaking server software you should let someone else worry about that for you until it makes sense for you to hire an Operations person/team.

I usually check out webhostingtalk.com to find reviews of web hosts, offers, and more. I would definitely suggest you check them out. I personally chose mddhosting.com for my website.

Some other things to keep in mind: you get what you pay for... So unlimited of something means they are skimping elseware. Also remember to always keep your own backups. Even if your host does keep them, which they probably don't, it is a pain to get files restored for you. It also is nice to be able to leave without begging for your files.

As for custom infrastructure and scaling... Chances are that most hosts put you on a typical shared cpanel box and anything special is going to require you to get a VPS or dedi server and set it up and manage everything yourself. It just isn't realistic to add features or special software for a single user. And that doesn't even get into having to support this new stuff, or deal with the security implications.

I've had a Linux server here at the house for upwards of 6 years, using DynDNS for a free name and a couple paid ones. Obvious potential issues off the top of my head:

• ISP TOS violation. I'm not using it to run a business so we're in the clear here.
• Availability. If our ISP connection hiccups, the server gets cut off from the outside world. Usually only a couple minutes at a time.
• Security. I have telnet turned off, SSH/FTP blocked except for some work clients whitelisted in /etc/hosts.allow, and run tripwire.
• Bandwidth. The web server sends out about 2 to 10 GB/month due to a single 50 MB file with no apparent ill effects, but e.g. a sufficiently popular image board could dwarf that.

Rarely do I go negative on the Internet. Things said on the internet stick with you forever, but maybe just a warning.

The company 1 and 1 seems to be using a collection agency to leverage money out of previous customers. While they may not be breaking any laws, but they are definitely taking advantage of their customers.

Google: "1 and 1" nco

There are pages of people who have fallen victim to this company.

A good narrative that describes almost exactly what happened to me...
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/1-amp-1-internet-inc-c161434.html [complaintsboard.com]

Sorry to post anonymously, I'm not really a coward, but with a company like this, you just cannot be too careful.

Low cost hosting providers rarely guarantee backup and restoration services as part of the low cost package. It is often a separate item entirely that must be paid for in addition to the standard account. Not only this, many of the shared/virtual private server type providers do not offer any guaranteed recovery period if the server you happen to be on goes down. If you are experiencing an outage due to another user sharing your hardware being compromised and they take the server offline, often times the provider will do nothing to get your site back up and running quickly even if you have the data prepared to slam back onto a new system; You just end up having to wait. (First hand recent experience with a one-and-one vps: The hardware had a drive controller failure. We have full backups of the VPS via bacula and if they were willing to give us a second vps on a new server at the same IP, we could have slammed the data back onto the server and been back up within the hour. They instead made my customer wait 48 hours while they worked on trying to make that original server work.)

Regardless of who you pay for hosting, your data is your responsibility. Their backups are worthless if you never actually prove they are usable yourself. Plan for disaster ahead of time and you'll be better off. Plan it at several different levels: what happens when the data is corrupt? What do you do if the server catches on fire? What do you do if the city/region experiences a catastrophe? What do you do when Joe Constructionworker is installing sprinklers next door and puts their backhoe through the datalines feeding the center? If your provider is offering to cover any one of these with a solution (like paying them to backup the data for your restoration) find out how you get the databack and what kind of SLA's they have. If they back it up, but it's a 24 hour process just to get to the point where you can restore things, that may not work for you. Understanding your recovery process before you need to put it in place is one of the biggest failings of many users/companies offering web based service delivery.

Now, one of the more interesting lower cost providers I've run into lately is Linode [linode.com]. You have a bit more flexibility in dealing with scaling and failover and you can move your virtual private server to bigger and beefier hardware as your site grows. They are working on an inhouse backup solution, but realistically if you care enough about your data, you'll regularly backup offsite with scripts or your favorite backup program (bacula anyone?). Linode is targetted more towards those who can admin their systems themselves rather than needing pre-setup solutions with GUI's (not that you couldn't use something like Plesk yourself on it). You can slowly scale your system hardwarewise to machines that have less and less shared users and you can even use multiple virtual servers with virtual load balancers in front of it (they have some interesting support for having a private lan between your virtuals that keeps the traffic 'local' and won't count against your bandwidth usage. You could use multiple virtual nic's to do load balancing with LVS type setups if you wanted).

For small LAMP sites (less than 10K visits per month)
Bluehost, ($7 per month)

For Medium LAMP sites (20K-50K visits per month
Media Temple Cloud ($20 or more per month)

For Bigger LAMP Sites (50k+ visits per month)
Rackspace Cloud ($150 per month)

The last two have their issues at times, but they are way better than managing your own server. If you like sysadmin work (and I don't) get a Rackspace cloud server or Media temple DV server, but I like the cloud and grid options. They scale automatically.

When you're going to get a new host, and it's not a name company (hostgator, dreamhost, etc.) do your research. There are a ton of resellers selling stuff from other resellers. It's like the Amway of the Internet. Look at the whois for your new host. If it's hidden behind one of those obfuscation services, it's a red flag. Look at the name servers. If it's the same as the host (ns1.host.com) it's a plus. If it's something else, go look at the website of the name service...you'll probably find it's where they're re-reselling hostspace. Try to get upline as much as possible, since if one of those people forgets to pay the bill, you're screwed with no (worthwhile) recourse.

I would suggest not going with IXWebhosting. They've been hit with injection attacks for over two years on an almost daily basis. I was with them for years until they were compromised. They will also blame you, saying your website was insecure...except I had fifteen domains that were parked with a single HTML page that just said "go away" hacked.

Make sure they're available 24/7, and that they answer the phones. My current VPS host (InMotionHosting) answered the phone at 1am and placed my order.

Watch out for all the "review" sites. Do a whois and you'll find many are owned by the hosts that get top billing. At the very least, every host review should have some negative hits from a disgruntled webmaster. Look for the ones that lay it all out, warts and all.

Never ever expect your host to back up your website. If it's not in your possession, it doesn't exist, unless you're lucky. Cron jobs are nice for dumping databases to a backup.

I personally like dedicated IPs. Since it seems you're multi-hosting, see if shared or individual IPs are available. Also, check to see if wildcard or sub-domains (space.host.com) are available.

Best of luck to you.

Most web hosting companies don't backup uploaded content. Too resource and time consuming. We have always backed up customer data as well as config. We also host on real servers using real hardware raid. Backups are stored offsite and offline (tape). Not as cheap as some but then you get what you pay for. Your three domains would cost around $20 per month.

http://www.cyberstreet.com/ [cyberstreet.com]

For not having backups. Mostly shared hosting does not include backups, and if they do it's very clearly stated and emphasized. Doing backups on that scale is very expensive.

Get a vps and host yourself. I've been a very happy customer of linode.com for years... had one issue when their central routers were caught in the crossfire of a DDOS attempt... Great support, quick on help if needed, and the "machine" specs keep going up with no increase in fees...

mrstrano: use Google App Engine. Either Java or Python, doesn't matter. FREE to start, great value when the website takes off and scales beyond what you'll likely need.

The one company that I recommend to everyone when it comes to shared hosting is ICDSOFT.com It will be extremely hard for you to find a bad review on the Internet, simply because their service is impecable...

I've used them for a year until I switched to a dedicated server and each time I had a question their tech support answered within 5 minutes with precise answers.
The main think about them is that they're not oversold - each account can hold only one website, you get only about 100-500 GB of bandwidth, 10-50 GB of disk space and several databases and free webmail/pop3/smtp with limited number of email accounts, and each server had their own RAID 5 setup. When I had the website hosted there my server had about 120 websites hosted on it.
This is actually great especially when you start your website as you'll know the server won't be overloaded, you won't have 10.000 websites on the server with all files being retrieved from a NAS (as Dreamhost does) and you won't have the accounts of 400-1000 people who abuse the "unlimited bandwidth and space" feature and stream music to their office from the hosting account or basically people that have Youtube clones on shared hosting accounts (as it happens on Dreamhost)
Most people when they see they get only a few hundred GB of bandwidth they go on looking for hosting companies with unlimited bandwidth, but in reality for a startup website on a sharing account even 100 GB of bandwidth is enough. If your website becomes popular enough to go over 100 GB of bandwidth used, you'll afford to get a 60$ a month server with 2 TB of bandwidth and 200 GB of disk space.

I've also used Dreamhost.com and Site5.com for a while, between ICDSoft and my own dedicated server, mainly because it was a good deal - used coupons to get one year for something like 10$. Site5.com was just slow, the control panel sucked....

Dreamhost was slowish, overloaded (the server I was on had about 12000 websites on it), the quality of the websites is lower (blogs which are not optimized therefore abusing PHP and MySQL servers) and the NAS where this web server was retrieving from was shared between about 5-6 web servers so you can imagine a 1gbps link from a NAS was used by about 100.000 websites. Also, their servers and hardware have issues all the time - there's no single day where one of their NAS would not crash, or one of their websites would die or the email server shared between 20-30 web servers would fail and so on... you can check dreamhoststatus.com to see how often they fail.

This is why having a colocated server or a VPS (virtual private server) is so important; you can create backup scripts and run them via crond, and use scp to pull down your backups regularly. That way, if your hosting provider does go under or fudges up in a major way, you can have your sites back up and running in a matter of a couple of hours on a new host. Depending on how you configure your own custom backup scripts, worst case you might lose a few hours' worth of data (and possibly the server, but the value of that is nil compared to the data) rather than losing everything.

back up your data elsewhere, no?

If not, you won't solve your problem (a lack of due diligence with respect to your own data) by switching hosts.

Tip #1: Don't have your domain registered with the same people who do your hosting. If you have some type of dispute with them, you're gonna be _especially_ screwed.

Tip #2: Just say 'no' to GoDaddy, for either of the two above mentioned services.

Tip #3: I've had good luck with Dotster for domain registration, but have had better luck with name.com recently, and moved all my domain registrations over to them.

Tip #4: Dreamhost for the hosting, though I honestly don't have any experience with them for high-volume hosting. There's a difference, though, between inexpensive hosting and high-volume hosting, and you'd best just learn that right now. You're not going to find cheap $11/mo hosting that scales. If you want scalability, you should at least _start_ with VPS hosting, and move up from there. That's a different class of hosting than shared hosting, and those two train tracks don't end up in the same town, ya dig? I _really_ like all of Dreamhosts's custom management stuff. One-click install 'Goodies', etc = a LOT of time saved. Way easier than CPanel, etc. I've been using Dreamhost for very low-volume sites for around a decade or so, and have had no major issues, and few enough minor issues to count on two hands (that's with a decade of service). YMMV, of course.

And no, I have no affiliation with any of the above-mentioned companies.

Another to avoid: Matrosity (rhymes with atrocity for a reason).

To answer this question, it's best to understand some of how the webhosting world works. There are many tiers of them.

At the bottom, where it sounds like you want to be, are the aggressive, overselling bulk hosters. They make only basic efforts to keep things running, offer little or no support, but if you know what you're doing you'll get good value... until something goes wrong or you reach their invisible limits.
These guys are really cheap but the chances are you will have problems or have to change away some time. Example: bluehost, dreamhost etc. They tend to have boom-bust cycles.

Next up is the semi-professional companies. For more money than most individuals would want to pay (like US$50-100 per month) they make a serious effort to provide a good service, will offer some personal support, and overall have a professional operation. Example: servint, other VPS providers.

Above that are the serious hosters, like rackspace, who provide a full service with dedicated servers. Most people and small companies won't justify this unless they are doing transactions or webb apps. You pay appropriately.

The point is, at the bottom, there is no sensible reason to choose between the budget hosting services. Whatever they say in their marketing, they are trying to offer a rock-bottom service with no support and limited capabilities; taking a punt that most customers won't use the claimed abilities.

Linux with your own BIN, PHP5, MySQL5, lots of bundled subdomains, high (or no) bandwidth caps, lots of email accounts and aliases, 24/7 support, guarantied 99.99% uptime, nightly backups, etc.

Yeah, yeah. Obvious, right? ...

What most people forget to look for are a security certificate so you can securely check your web-mail and SFTP/SSH in to your site; secure email and IMAP. ...

Oh, and they should have a status page showing ongoing maintenance. That saves a lot of headaches.

1) Failures will happen. Design for them. Have at least two hosts, in significantly different physical locations. If a host gets hacked, if their backups were silently failing, if they go out of business without warning like RedONE did, if they get hit by natural disaster, et cetera; there just isn't anything you can do to isolate from that. Redundancy is key.

2) Ask hosts about their backup policy and strategy, as well as their redundant disk setup, before you get started. It's not a perfect answer, but it gives you a decent sense of how on the ball they are - if they're spending for the extra disk space, then they're probably not cheaping out other places either.

3) A week or two in, request a backup restore. You don't have to make up a failure or anything; just say you've had problems with hosts lying about backups in the past, and you want to make sure you're on good ground. Make some changes to your setup beforehand every 10 minutes on a cron, so you know how old the backup is when it's restored.

4) Ask about gotcha policies like how they handle over-bandwidth (free day, shutoff, charge per unit, etc) and so forth. That'll give you a sense of how they'll behave if/when problems happen.

5) Expect problems to happen. The engineering overhead of replication isn't that big these days, and the cost of not having it is immense. Furthermore, in addition to replication, which secures against failure, also have backup, which secures against attack. Backup can be by FTP to one of those cheapo shared hosts that don't care about disk space, but it needs to be at a distinct third location.

Basically, don't try to find a host that won't have problems. You'll find Santa Claus sooner. Parts fail, people make errors, people do shady things, attacks are made, natural disasters and backhoes happen, et cetera.

Just have a contingency plan in place. If you can handle a failure, it's no longer a critical problem. It's usually cheaper to have three normal hosts than one super duper bullet proof host. Leverage economy. The internet is designed for handling the failure of cheap parts through massive redundancy.

Leverage that. It's the smartest thing in network history.

Shared hosting is like like living in a small house with fifty strangers. All of you have a job that requires you to go in and out all the time. And there is only one door.

Go for a cheap dedicated and unmanaged server and carefully manage your own backups. Watch out for 95% billing if you have any real traffic needs. Look for reviews in forums like webhostingtalk, not review sites. As recommended by an earlier commenter, look at the nameservers and make sure you are buying from the actual provider and not a reseller. Look at the upstream providers of your selected server provider, tier-1 ISPs are good, as well as lots of bandwidth between your chosen ISP and the internet, and a good SLA. Avoid "shared 100mbps". Look for extra costs you may have to pay before actually making a contract - For example, many providers will charge ridiculous amounts of money for extra IP addresses or extra domains in some stupid exclusive control panel (*cough*Plesk*cough*). A good domain name registrar is name.com. A bad domain name registrar is godaddy. Buying your domain name from your server host is unthinkably stupid.

Long story short - If the data is critical - trust no-one - use multiple different sources which you control for the data!

You get what you pay for. If you want total control, man up and take it! Get a VPS from Linode or Slicehost and configure the server exactly how you want. They offer similar service for similar prices. To get you started, Linode has a LAMP StackScript available that can have you up and running in about 2 minutes. From there, configure Apache for multiple vhosts and you're all set.

The downside is that ultimately, yo're responsible. The upside is that they don't touch your stuff and are expandable nearly instantly

I DEFINITELY recommend linode.com which gives you root and your own distro. They have kept expanding your hard disk etc. for free periodically for years, and keep developing new things for its users. You ssh in and can install anything you want, and can organize disk images, reboots and dns from dashboard.

However you wouldn't want to host a simple very high volume site there, so I have hostgator as well. I haven't pushed it, but their baby account seems quite good. It is the opposite of linode, being high capacity and lower functionality but even then it has quite a lot of good stuff. Cpanel based but with ssh too.