Depending on your needs, what your serving from the site (HTML, streaming audio/video) and the amount of traffic to your site, I'd recommend these:
Low End (Simple Hosting) - 1&1
- They are a popular web host, but based on my experience with them, their technical support is terrible and they have some bad customer TOS in place. One instance that burned me with them was the credit card I had on file with them for Billing expired and I forgot to update the account info. On a Friday night at 7p my sites went down. When I called the tech support and found out what the issue was, they couldn't unlock the account with the updated CC information until Monday 8am when their billing department was open again. If you hosting a blog or something that's not got a lot of traffic, no big deal, but I was hosting 10 high traffic website from them on a managed server. By 10pm, we had a new web host. Now imagine your hosting your haunts website with them and that happens to you on Halloween weekend. Your sites down from the 29th and they won't bring it back until Nov 1st when the billing department opens.
Mid Range (Medium Traffic to Site / Managed Virtual Server) - KnownHost.com
- I recently just used these guys for some of my website hosting and they offer great VPS packages for the price. In the two years that I've been with them, I've only had two downtimes with them that was about 5 hours long at the most. But they have a 99.9% uptime. The only quirky thing with them is they don't offer phone support. If you have an issue with your server, you have to submit a Trouble Ticket thru their website. But if you flag it Urgent, you will get a responce from their Tech Support in less than 30mins. Never really had a problem with them and I recommend them to clients that I'm doing web development for if they need a host.
High End (Major Traffic / Dedicated Managed Server) - RackSpace.com
- If you are hosting a very popular / major traffic website (like your site is a top ten haunt that is being featured on Discovery / Travel Channel), then I would recommend these guys. They provide web hosting to sites like Digg, Gizmodo, etc... They can handle anything that you can throw at it.
Live Video / Audio Streaming - BitGravity - In Addition to one of the Previous Web Host Mentioned Above (One for Website Hosting / BitGravity for A/V only)
- If your wanting to deliver live or pre-recorded audio / video from your site and you have some pretty decent traffic (that would cost more money and push you over your monthly bandwidth allowance by a provider like 1&1) then I would recommend these guys. BitGravity has some really amazing technology and is able to get video or audio streaming instantly with little buffer time. They provide streaming services for TWiT, Revision 3 (Diggnation / TRS), Showtime, College Humor and many others.
I know this is probably was more information than you wanted, but I figured I might as well put it all out there for everyone in case people are working on or thinking about their web solutions.
I use and refer all my clients to Godaddy. They have some of the cheapest hosting I've seen (around $50 per year), they're reliable and they provide 24/7 live support in case anything ever goes wrong or you need help. They also offer a variety of third-party software that can be installed on your site with just a couple of clicks, which is nice.
In the past I have used ReadyHosting but I grew to be dissatisfied with them after one of their servers got hacked and my site was hijacked, plus they were charging over $100 per year for hosting.
I've been using u2-web.com since 05 or 06 and we've never had any major issues with them. There was one outage since we've been using them and it wasn't their fault per-se. The NOC that they host out of went down, taking u2-web (and a few hundred others) down with them. It was fixed reasonably quick, less than a day. It wasn't during our season, so it wasn't a loss to us.
They've been easy to deal with, they're tech support (Steve) is great. Keep in mind it's chat or email only, no phone, which I'm perfectly ok with. Their prices are good and they let us change our plan before and after our season so that we don't get overage charges during the season. I've already pushed 90gig for September alone :-O
-Brandon Kelm
Operations Manager & Technical Director
I've been hosting a couple of sites on Dreamhost since 2002. Tech support is great and I've never had any down time that I know of. Unlimited bandwidth & disk space, and you can host as many domains as you want on one account. $9-$11/mo
My name is Christina. My boyfriend Justin and I run a small web development business at www.jcpsnowproductions.com if you have any questions feel free to send us an email off our site!
I just loved walking through Busch Gardens with my friend and staring at people... we didn't work there and all we had was face make up. Yet, my friend and I still shook them up.
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