which hosting company is cheap and best.

[Robert D]

Hi Everyone,

It very hard to find out which hosting company is cheap and best. At the end I found this  www,thehost-review.com it is the best review site I have so far seen. I would welcome any suggestion and help.

Regards,

[Menard]

Well, you seemed to have asked this question more than once.

I hate to use cliches, and I'll steer away from that, but cheap and best do not necessarily walk hand-in-hand. A lot of this as well depends on what you consider to be cheap.

How about 99 cents a month, or $9.99 for a full year?

http://www.onedollarhoster.net/plans.php offers 1 GB of space with no bandwidth limits for 99 cents a month. I have only been with them for about two weeks, but so far so good.

They do, as they are doing updates, have a tendency toward downtime early Sunday morning. Their servers do, however, readily accept scripts.

Byethost has some low cost plans starting at $2.99 a month. They are fast and reliable. The only bug is that you may have to work with some php scripts to get them to work on their servers.

[Andy]

I think this guy is advertising his own affiliate site since  Dot5 Hosting is listed with a rating of 5 but are the worst ever hosting company online. Just search for them and read the terrible reports from customers. I made a mistake of registering a site with them recently and luckily they were so incompetent that they couldn't even process my payment. Hosting companies often pay huge affiliate commissions so affiliates put up bogus review sites just to cash in.

[Andy]

It's always best to get tips of actual friends who use particular hosts rather than people looking for $100 commissions. Menard's suggestions look interesting.

Most sites I build only need a few megs of space with php, mysql and I like to have Aweber stats.

But I would like to find a very cheap host to stream video from.

I use HostGator which is excellent hosting but is up in the $10 per month range. Another host I would like to hear more opinions on is DreamHost.

For UK Hosting I use www.supanames.co.uk They are cheap at around $64 for 2 years. It includes mysql, php and unlimited bandwidth but no stats unless you pay extra. But I would only use them for UK specific hosting since they use manual processes to set up your site and try and make you think you have to transfer your domain name to them. You do for a .co.uk but for .com etc. you only need to change your nameservers. If you want to resell UK hosting, this are a good company to use since there is no reseller setup cost involved.

[donecweb]

I think this guy is advertising his own affiliate site since  Dot5 Hosting is listed with a rating of 5 but are the worst ever hosting company online. Just search for them and read the terrible reports from customers. I made a mistake of registering a site with them recently and luckily they were so incompetent that they couldn't even process my payment. Hosting companies often pay huge affiliate commissions so affiliates put up bogus review sites just to cash in.

Andy, what makes you think this guy is advertising his own affiliate? I agree there is something weird about the wording as he claims to have found a new site and yet he says "I would welcome any suggestion and help" Like it was his site but maybe he means he would like to have help finding a good server. I see the review for the company you mentioned but I don't see any sign of it being an affiliate of the site he mentioned. Of course I may not be able to tell since I don't deal with affiliates, at least not yet.

[xpguy]

wait arn't 1&1 that Yeah in business there is a term you get what you pay for so keep in mind when paying a small amount of money and expecting a great deal more.

The hosting market is so large though its hard to succeed in it, think about it if a webhost is offering hosing for $1/month how can they pay for their mortgage, electricity, other bills, the server or reseller account (even if they use their own computer) they still have to pay for the internet line and to pay for hardware renewals if they break down then there is the staff if any it doesn't add up.

Evene th staff member alone will want like 15,000usd a yr minimum to feed and look after themselves a $1 a month plan won't cut it

[Menard]

...there is a term you get what you pay for...

That term, and all cliches, are just for people who can't think for themselves.

I have a dollar hosting account with hostingpuppy, and it has, so far, been leaps and bounds better than what I had with another service that charged me $9.95 a month.

I have an account with hostgator which allows me to pay by the month, and with no bogus setup fees. It is more expensive than the dollar hosting, but they offer so much more and the uptime has been super.

I don't look at hosts and pre-judge them by a silly yardstick of whomever charges more must be better.

[Andy]

I think that the cheapest hosting can be good as long as you don't expect customer support since that is an expensive service for hosts to provide. As long as the admins of the hosting are good and set up the servers well, you could do OK hosting a simple site with dirt cheap hosts. It works for me.

[agent]

9.99 $ a year is the best mix of the quality of service and cheap price... lower the prices worse the service 

[Andy]

Don't you mean per month? I wouldn't expect to receive any customer support for $9.99 a year.

Also, I think if you are in business, why not pay at least $10 per month since it should be a negligible amount as a business expense?

[stu]

This is a pretty interesting subject. i have a hosting website with two hosting servers in the data exchange in london. http://www.webreger.com with prices from £45 per year with domain name

I spent hours working out the correct price and reviewing many many web hosting company's and forums.

most of the cheep hosting company's don't offer all the requirements that a website will need now. also what about website monitoring in case the server goes down. thats why i have two servers. its monitored 24/7 and if one server goes down and cannot be sorted out instantly i have to switch all the accounts over to another server.

Plus you can not just throw all websites on to one server. shared servers can be very damaging to search engine placement. a hosting server can get a bad reputation with google extra if it does and your websites on it you wont get great placement. your website will get punished. a good hosting company needs to monitor the websites it host. if the website its hosting is getting a bad reputation its needs to be switched to another server before it damages the other repubatul websites it hosts. another reason for the second server.

Pay cheep and just get thrown.

Find out before you get hosting if its a shared server. how is it monitored. whats there guaranteed up time. all servers will go down at some point. but will they insistently move you to another server or wait till they get it fixed. do they have another server to move it to.

be careful the right hosting can make a big difference.

All these factors reflect in the cost. the cheapest isnt the best but then again neither is the dearest! 

[Andy]

Stu, what you say is good but implies that you have a different IP address for each server. Does this mean that clients can enter say 4 nameserver values into their DNS settings?

I personally, like to keep my domain names separate from the hosting so that I can easily switch hosts if I have a problem with them and not have to take onboard or sympathize with any problems they may get that has nothing to do with me.

[stu]

Yes domain names are kept separet and clients can take them to any hosting provide they wish.

also yes both servers have separet ip address for the reasson stated. not sure the full details of top of my head as i have that side managed for me, i intervien as and when plus just to double check and kepp people on there toes and make sure i'm not getting coned lol

i try my best

a lot of my sites i maage for the clients so i take care of the and move them as and when. clients that  buy just hosting can point the domain to which ever server

[Andy]

If you isolate your domain name hosting from the website hosting and pay monthly for the web hosting then you minimise any risk IMHO. So why not go with cheap hosting in this case? Many sites are very simple with basic needs so don't need anything special.

So what if they are overselling, as long as they are delivering a reliable basic service, all should be fine. You can also search for complaints on the web.

Newbies are probably drawn towards the flashy numbers of X gigs of space etc.

Also, it could be a benefit to host with multiple cheap hosts to get different IP addresses for your sites, just a thought. This could be a way to create a mini-network of sites that appear to naturally link to one another or at least can't be detected as collaborating.

[preelye]

I think that keeping eggs in different baskets policy applied to keeping domain name registration services and hosting separate may not be valid any longer as hosts usually register domains with 100% Client ownership