
Shared Web Hosting: Who Is Good? - motoko
News.YC, all that I want is a simple LAMP stack with standard settings for my wordpress blogs that's fast, has excellent uptime, has SSH access, and will automatically adjust for traffic if I'm Dugg. I'm even happy to pay a premium (up to $50/mo) for a _good_ service that's <i>not</i> going to make me deal with administrivia.<p>I've been using Media Temple, and they suck.<p>Please help me. This must be useful information for others here, too.
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domnit
I use NearlyFreeSpeech.net
<[https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/>](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/>),
which I heard about from BugMeNot. It's pay-per-use, so it can be very cheap
(equivalent to a few cents / month, except it's not billed monthly). If you
have a spike in traffic, they'll handle that just fine, since each site isn't
bound to a single physical server. That also means your site isn't slowed down
if some neighbor uses a lot of resources.

Some drawbacks are that there's no FastCGI, so no Django or Rails, and you
can't get your own IP address, even for money, so no TLS. Also, it's Apache
1.3, if you care. If you just need to run some Wordpresses, they do a bang-up
job or running mod_php 5.

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Prrometheus
Doesn’t Amazon do something similar?

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domnit
S3 is pay per use, but it's for static data hosting. EC2 is pay-per-use
virtual machines, but it's at the granularity of machines. If you need a bunch
of real, or real-looking servers, that's good, but it's too expensive if what
you need is shared hosting.

S3 is cheaper than NFSN, so if you have lots of big files, you can host
www.example.com on NFSN and point media.example.com to S3.

(Grain of salt: I haven't used EC2.)

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curio
I recommend Powweb to everyone. Reasons why I love them:

\- cheap: $7.77/month

\- reliable: i've never seen them go down

\- advanced developer features: cron, .htaccess, php.ini editing

\- really clean user interface (forget using godaddy)

\- amazing customer support: call them. they answer first ring. there's no
waiting for hours after trying to navigate crappy phone tree systems.

i've used a dozen different shared web hosts over the years and the vast
majority of them suck. Powweb really stands apart from the crowd, especially
when it comes to advanced features and customer support. When I was doing web
design consulting I moved every single one of my clients over to Powweb --
they're that much better.

<http://www.powweb.com/join/index.bml?AffID=563885>

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nikiscevak
Here's a great site that pings and monitors shared hosting accounts. Price
isn't really a correlating factor.

<http://www.realmetrics.com/r/shared-hosting>

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curi
cool, /upvote

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thomas
Slicehosting is great, but you need to do all the dirty work, like choose the
OS, setup apache, do the security, etc.

I'm using MT's Grid and have had good luck, but you have to be on Grid Cluster
1- it seems like Cluster 2 is down every week.

Someone actually recommended <http://asmallorange.com> to me recently, but I
have no experience with them.

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jmzachary
Slicehost

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thinkcomp
I'm pretty skeptical about most shared hosts, so I set up my own hosting
environment. I host my own sites via a data center in Santa Clara, and a few
other people's, as well. Feel free to get in touch.

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andr
Think about whipping up a quick Facebook app and getting a free Facebook
accelerator from Joyent. They are free for an year and you can host other
stuff on it. Wicked fast and run on Solaris (which can be a bitch in the
beginning if you are used to the Linux environment, but they have Webmin, PHP,
Ruby, MySQL, Apache, LightHTTPd, etc. preinstalled).

<http://joyent.com/developers/facebook/>

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crystalarchives
I personally like ASmallOrange; they're a small gig, but their customer
service is AMAZING - I've been hacking, had a problem at 1 am in the morning,
emailed them about it and got it fixed in half and hour - three times already.

www.asmallorange.com

Their prices are reasonable, too, and the shell access is great, but the speed
isn't blazing, although very acceptable. You should be fine if you're not too
graphics intensive.

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randomhack
webfaction has served some of my friends well.

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cstejerean
for shared hosting I highly recommend webfaction as well. I've used them until
I needed to move to a VPS.

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PStamatiou
if you're willing to pay up to $50 why not upgrade to a mediatemple (dv) VPS?

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itsandrew
Agreed. I currently have a VPS with Rimuhosting and it's just shy of
$40-50/month. All servers come pre-configured with all the basics. If you ever
need something installed/configured which is out your realm the support staff
is great about guiding you how to do it or just doing it for you.

