Huddled Masses
January 4th, 2006 | 
Author: So, I was just checking out a few new webhosting deals, aside from the one I usually recommend.
BlueHost
Normally I suggest BlueHost, which offers 10GB 15GB of disk space and 250GB 400GB of transfer in addition to a free for life domain, self-generated SSL certificates and all the usual stuff like PHP, Ruby on Rails and Fantastico and shell access … for only $6.95 a month (if you sign up for two years). Honestly that’s still the cheapest hosting around, long-term.
DreamHost
However, DreamHost has to be the most interesting deal I’ve seen, and actually may have more bang for the buck than BlueHost! Their $7.95 a month (for two years) is only a dollar more than BlueHost, and you can save $30 off that by using GEOSHELL as your coupon code, which actually makes it cheaper than BlueHost for the first 2 years … and they offer 20GB of disk space, and a full Terabyte of transfer, both of which increase weekly (by 160 MB and 8 GB, respectively). They also give you unlimited domains and MySQL databases, PHP4 and PHP5, Ruby on Rails, and your own Jabber and CVS servers! Excellent for collaborative development projects, and I gotta say, I really like the idea of having my own Jabber server… oh, and they have a 3 month money-back guarantee.
NetFirms
But in the purely cheap hosting arena, I found a new contender in NetFirms, where one of my friends works. Their $9.95 a month hosting offers 20GB of disk space, and 750 GB transfer … and now they include shell access, as well as ruby and python (they also offer to pre-install and configure WordPress as your default web page). Now at $10 a month, I’ve never been that impressed, but I just found out they have a coupon code: 998, which gives you the first year for only $9.98 (yeah, for the whole year, that’s 92% off). Pretty cool, eh? If you think about it, that makes two years less than $120, so it’s like $5 a month, way cheaper than anything else out there!
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Hi,
I reccomend to try this fantastic offer from Servage, I am their client for 1 year and 3 months by now, http://www.servage.com, where you get 25 domains to host, unlimited emails, unlimited mysql databases, and a whole bunch of features, for only 7.5 USD/month. Also includded one domain or transfer for free and 25 GB space. If you sign up with this coupon: cust10293 you get another 500MB free.
They have also a good support team, with short response time. Also, from time to time, they increase the space for hosting. For example, I have signed up last year with 7GB now I have 35GB.
Best,
Alex
ps. you can contact me
I’ve been using netfirms for years and their best selling point is their technical support – you always get to talk to someone. Only in this past year has my site had any downtime at all, and I was pretty pissed off about it, but for over 5 years of hosting, I’d have to recommend them.
I highly unrecommend Netfirms. They have crappy support and they don’t even support mod_rewrite so you are extremely limited with what you do regarding websites especially WordPress. I switched to site5 and use my netfirms account as a file dump.
Be wary of Dream Host. I fell for the blurb and signed up yesterday. Twelve hours later I got a refund — minus $9.95 for the inevitable free domain that I’m now unable to transfer elsewhere for sixty days (I mean, to take advantage of free hosting again for that domain). Their configuration panel is the most unintuitive I’ve used in ten years (seriously, TABnet had something better than that in 1996), every kind of configuration option seems likely to cause errors or downtime (just changing an email account’s password results in the account becoming inaccessible for several hours, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg), and of course, on that price-plan, the telephone support is non-existent. (See the blurb, it states that you’re not entitled to it.)
I chose this host not only because of the Wordpress rec, but because I thought I was finally giving something back to them ($97 USD for being referred). Now I’m convinced that the $97 USD incentive is the only reason Wordpress recommended Dream Host because I doubt anybody with experience of them would endorse them.
Various Webserver diagnostic sites also judged my pages to be loading 3-5 seconds slower than on my original modhost server. (And I was in a position to compare identical sites, having just transferred a Wordpress blog to Dream Host.) Never again.
I’ve been on dreamhost for the past year – they add new tools pretty regularly, I haven’t had any tools break my site or crash, and his subjective comments regarding usability should be taken with a grain of salt.
I tried going to Walker’s site, but there’s just a placeholder there.
You’d think people would take bargain-basement shared web hosting with a grain of salt, but I suppose some people have different realities.
If you want free hosting, try HostMe123 – 300 MB Disk Space, 10 GB Monthly Transfer, 7 MySQL Databases, 5 Add-On Domains, POP3, Webmail and a lot more. For $7 you can pay to get rid of the footer ad for the lifetime of your hosting account.
Hostgator.com. is better than all of you guys’ sites. Im not kidding. And good support too. I work there
All reseller plans have better stuff than anything you have posted here..
[pondering] So, you’re not biased or anything [detective]?!