I made my very first personal website a while back, and I’ve grown to like it. Alas, it is on an academic server that will surely cut me off at the end of the summer.
What’re the best (or at least better) options out there for me? The site is fairly small in size. The cheaper, the better (though I hear most free options are kinda junk). I guess I’d like to know my choices in the widest range I can get, so I can make my own cost/benefit analyses for whether I value my money or my sanity more.
I’ve used www.mymarkdown.com for close to 2 years now, and found them pretty good. They have a 250MB space/5GB bandwidth plan for $2 a month (domain name registration extra, typically $8 a year). Just weighing in. Reliability is good, and their turnaround time for queries by email has been about an hour. Occassional speed drops, but I don’t host anything very big, so that’s not really an issue.
I personally like Netrillium (www.netrillium.com), but I’d say they’re mostly for take it seriously. It’s cheap, there’s good customer service, and they’re willing to fix your coding for you if you eff up. They do backups every day.
Looking at their site, they have a $3 a month package with 150 megs of space, 9 gigs, unlimited e-mails, subdomains, and ftp accounts, cpanel with fantastico (a cool domain management script with Fantastico, which is a script installer for things like greymatter, et cetera) and a plethora of other cool stuff. Domains through them are $8.50 a year.
Both of them have been great options, though I’m letting my account at lunarpages lapse as the dreamhost product is a bit more flexible, and their account management tools are more straightforward.
Of course, both of those are a bit more expensive than the $2 a month that Dervorin’s host charges (lunar pages is 6.95 a month… oh, that’s down $1 from where it used to be, and dreamhost is 7.95), but they provide quite a bit more in storage/bandwidth and other features.