Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away not just MediaWiki (the software which runs Wikipedia) but also the hosting you need to run it. And even further, if you run what they consider to be a popular website, you can even have the advertising revenue from your wiki.

The only catch is that they appear to be sort of forcing the GNU FDL on you, which could cause problems for people who would prefer some other license (like a Creative Commons license, perhaps?) and although Memory Alpha was able to get a different deal, one doubts that anyone else would — Memory Alpha is a 7-Million hits per month site which brings in some serious ad revenue.

At any rate, Wikia’s OpenServing service will be giving away hosting in a MediaWiki derivative in exchange for links back to Wikia. Not just that, but according to this article on eWeek they are hoping to become a sort of unified hosting based on open source website software such WordPress and Drupal. In fact, they’re open to suggestions, so if you are a web software developer and have some other open source software you’re willing to help them install and maintain on their servers … they want to hear from you.

So, for nearly three years this site has been hosted on a free promotional account from 1&1, but that account expires sometime in October, and I’ve been looking around at the usual places trying to figure out what my best option is. It’s really hard to decide to spend even $7 a month on something that I’ve been getting for free, but the account this is hosted on is really minimal by today’s standards, so some of the extras are catching my interest.

The baseline account that I usually compare to is the $7 hosting from BlueHost which currently offers 30GB of storage and 750GB of bandwidth … but of course, I don’t need a quarter of that (actually, right now I have only 500MB of storage, and I use less than 2GB of transfer on this domain). So I started wondering if there’s anyone cutting them up smaller than that.

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Well, it’s cheap … and I’ve got no complaints about 1and1 (they currently host huddledmasses.org).

$4.99 for 50GB of space, and 500GB monthly transfer volume. You even get 25 MySQL databases, 10 FTP accounts, and the usual scripting languages (Perl, Python, PHP). You have full ability to host multiple domains and subdomains — you even get two domain names free, and a thousand email accounts.

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!

So, I’ve been looking for a hosting solution for my church’s website … we need to grow, and our current host is just not positioned to make that affordable. I was looking for something over 500 MB of disk space, with over 15 GB of monthly network traffic, and in particular, for a host with SSL enabled so we can set up a storefront to sell Concert tickets as well as books and CD’s that are being produced by EGC and Elim Publishing … Of course, we’re also talking about setting up seperate domains, or possibly just sub-domains for the “Youth” and the “Concerts” ... and I need to be able to give the people in charge of those areas FTP access, but limit it to those areas, and of course, I need seperate SQL databases for them.

With all that in mind, I went shopping. I’ll add some more information about other hosts later on, but the bottom line is that BlueHost looks astonishing, with 2 4 GB of disk space, 75 100 GB of Transfer, SSL and even GPG so you can generate certificates, as well as SSH access and the ability to create your own MySQL or PostgreSQL databases. Of course, they also have anonymous FTP, and the ability to create up to 1000 2500 individual POP3 and FTP accounts with their own directories … They have an amazing number of preinstalled scripts: from three different webmail apps (NeoMail, Horde, SquirrelMail) and three statistics packages set up on each subdomain (and on the whole package) (Analog, Webalizer, and Awstats), they even have fantastico set up so you can easily install anything from Mambo (An amazing CMS) (which we’re thinking about using for the church site) to Moodle (which I just set up for Elim Bible Institute) and of course WordPress and Gallery (both of which I use here on this site).

So anyway … I haven’t signed up for an account yet … I’m just wondering if anyone has tried them? I’m basically looking for testimonials (other than those which might be planted out there already). Incidentally, if you have other recommendations, feel free to mention them, but keep in mind the stats on this deal and don’t waste your time on huge descriptions, since I can check out the feature set myself []

Update: 9-Dec-2004

Well, I ended up going with BlueHost for ElimOnline and the moodle install worked perfectly. So far, I’m quite happy with it, no problems whatsoever.

Update: 7-Jun-2005

I just noticed BlueHost has doubled the disk space they offer, so I figured I’d update this post in case anyone finds it while looking for information on hosting companies. I’ve now got several sites hosted with BlueHost, and the only problem I’ve had is one of my “customers” that couldn’t make up their mind if they wanted the free domain or the free domain transfer, and ended up confusing the BlueHost sales guy.