# Web hosting recommendations? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 7, 2011, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-hosting-recommendations/570581 "2011-02-07T22:13:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![rogerbox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/76d3ee/32.png) [@rogerbox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rogerbox)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2011, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-hosting-recommendations/570581/1 "2011-02-07T22:13:00Z")
I’m looking into web hosts, but the first page of google results all seem to be paid shills… I’m very afraid of relying on google results for “web host reviews”, for example [fatcow.com](http://fatcow.com) seems to have great pricing and reviews, but then I found a review site that has tons of negatives. I am looking for something that is reliable, not slow, not horribly expensive (I don’t need bargain bin pricing, but not overpriced either), and bonus if it has easy shopping cart/credit card integration. Any personal preferences? 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![Crowbar\_of\_Irony\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f08c70/32.png) [@Crowbar\_of\_Irony\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crowbar_of_Irony_3)\ **Post date:** [February 8, 2011, 10:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-hosting-recommendations/570581/2 "2011-02-08T10:30:03Z")
My personal preference is [Hostgator](http://www.hostgator.com). Good customer support, up-time and it includes domain registar and transfer. ---
**Author:** ![Claverhouse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/13edae/32.png) [@Claverhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claverhouse)\ **Post date:** [February 8, 2011, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-hosting-recommendations/570581/3 "2011-02-08T10:52:43Z")
You don’t mention what type of site: some hosts are geared to blogs, some to fora, some to commercial, etc… Looking it up on Google with all the duplicated useless results is as purely awful as you imply. For a general personal site ( and possibly for most types including commercial **[business](http://www.speedysparrow.com/business.html)** hosting ) **[Speedy Sparrow](https://my.speedysparrow.com/cart.php)** seems very good indeed. I’m not with them myself, but the owner spent a month attempting to transfer my site from Dreamhost ( which is reliable but slow ) without success since Dreamhost has… unique control panel issues… and then refunded my money. I was very impressed with his professionalism. Starting a site there should have no such difficulties. I had planned to move to **[TekSapiens](http://www.teksapienshosting.com/)** in Texas, which is reputed as very fast; and their price for small sites are cheaper than Dreamhost. However they suggested $500 extra for 5GB of storage. Dreamhost does permit much more than that whilst Speedy Sparrow included that amount easily without fuss. I still want to get away from Dreamhost, but they have been very good hosts apart from the slowness of shared servers. ---
**Author:** ![Unintentionally\_Blank](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/unintentionally_blank/32/5418_2.png) [@Unintentionally\_Blank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unintentionally_Blank)\ **Post date:** [February 8, 2011, 10:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-hosting-recommendations/570581/4 "2011-02-08T10:54:57Z")
What are you looking to do? If you just want a box to stand on and shout out into the world, [wordpress.com](http://wordpress.com) and [blogspot.com](http://blogspot.com) are free, if you want a little more, squrespace comes recommended with the cheapest version costing about $12 a month. If you want the whole friggin tamale (50 accounts, shared calendars, email, documents, 1 Gb website) google business is $50 a year, with a little additional to someone like godaddy for a domain name. Lastly, if you have broadband at home…you could throw a webserver on an unused machine, but that puts you in the ISP business and has [some security drawbacks](http://www.oddfiddlythings.com/2011/rocketsled/short-bus-networking/) ---
**Author:** ![rogerbox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/76d3ee/32.png) [@rogerbox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rogerbox)\ **Post date:** [February 8, 2011, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-hosting-recommendations/570581/5 "2011-02-08T14:52:20Z")
Its for the smallest home business you can imagine. 🙂