At the moment, my personal/professional website is being hosted through my college. However, I’m graduating in a few months and need to find another place to put my site. There are a lot of cheap web providers out there, but apparently very few of them are any good–I keep reading testimonials from disgruntled ex-customers about long periods of downtime, shitty customer service, etc.
A few details:
I don’t need a lot of space. A lot of providers are offering more than a gigabyte of space, which seems ridiculous considering that my entire website takes up only 27 megs (22 of which are MP3 downloads, which a lot of webhosts don’t allow anyway). I doubt that my site will ever rise to 100 megabytes, let alone 1000.
I might be adding a message board for my webcomic once I start updating it on a regular basis. I’m not certain what software I’d be using for that, but I’d like whichever host I use to be able to accommodate a message board.
I don’t really need a “Web Control Panel” since I prefer to FTP things directly.
I’m not entirely sure what a MySQL database is, but I probably don’t need it.
I DEFINITELY don’t need FrontPage support.
I use Lunarpages.com and I’ve been thrilled with them for three years now.
Help is plentiful either in documentation, or direct tech support–email or toll-free phone.
For one price they include a long list of services, including a message board.
(Note: tech support does not support the message board, but it doesn’t need much tech savvy to get it up and running. I know zero code, but I managed to customize the colors and artwork for our MB.)
The Standard Web Hosting Plan starting at $7.95 a month includes up to 3000 MB storage.
I spent a long time researching hosts, and these guys are the best I’ve found.
G’luck,
I use avahost.net. Reasonable prices, reasonably good service. $7.93/mo for what you’d likely choose, assuming you buy in 1 year increments.
Earthlink has better service, and much higher prices. I used to use them.
There’s one that’s WAAAAY cheaper if you’re using a lot of bandwidth, but I forget the name… and the way cheap one is the sloppiest hosting you’ll EVER see.
Looks nice, but I have mixed feelings about getting an account with an “adult industry” webhost. On the one hand, I’ve read that they tend to have very reliable servers. On the other hand…ew.
For what it’s worth, they host my girlfriend’s (non-porn!) site, and she’s had no trouble related to her choice of host. Hell, I only found out that it was an “adult” host when she sent me a link to their rates page.
You’ll need MySQL if you’re going to run any PHP scripts. Why would you want PHP scripts? Well, among other things, that’s one way to implement a message board. Most decent-quality webhosts should bundle a number of these pre-written scripts with their offerings, so something like phpBB may thus already be part of your service plan.
FWIW, the cheapest plan from these people is $30/year for 100 MB storage and 2 GB/mo. bandwidth, which appears to be sufficient for your current needs. However, an active message board may potentially suck away that bandwidth pretty quickly. I’ve been using them for about half a year so far and haven’t really had any problems, but the site I administer gets only a small amount of traffic, so YMMV.