Which Web Host Do You Recommend? (FAQ)
(by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com)
I worry a lot about this page. I originally set it up to cut down the amount of email I receive at thesitewizard.com asking me to recommend a web host. However, over time, I have found that I had to revise this page numerous times as a result of changes in the web hosting scene. The worst thing is finding out that the quality of hosting at the hosts I had earlier mentioned here had deteriorated. Naturally those hosts are no longer listed below.
The best way to treat this page is to regard the comments I make here about web hosts as merely the opinions of one person given at a particular point in time. I recommend that you investigate thoroughly any host before signing up. You can find a list of things you should look for in a web host in my other article How to Choose a Web Host.
Note that I only mention commercial and free web hosts providing shared hosting (where yours is not the only website on a particular machine). Since I have no direct experience with leasing a dedicated server or getting a virtual private server (VPS), this page will not mention any companies providing such facilities.
Commercial Web Hosts: My Personal Favourite
At present, thesitewizard.com is hosted at FutureQuest, and indeed has been on this host since 2000. So far, I have found them to be reliable, honest and competent, with the people at the helm appearing to be people who understand the software and issues that surround running web servers. Their prices are not the cheapest around, but I find that they are well worth the price. The old adage, "you get what you pay for", seems most appropriate in their case, and I would rather pay that few extra dollars for their reliability and competence than to find my sites down for long periods at a stretch, costing me more money than the few bucks I can save in hosting fees.
Things I like about them include the automatic availability of a secure shell account (SSH) without requiring me to ask for it, numerous Apache modules (including the important mod_rewrite module), Perl modules and other developer facilities. Also, no other customer with an account on the same server as you can read and copy your scripts by simply telnetting to their account and changing to your directory to read/copy them (something which, you might be surprised to learn, you can do on many other web hosts).
And then there are the intangibles, which are hard to quantify. For example, there are things like their competence which has been demonstrated in the way they manage their servers, plan ahead, etc. I also like their honesty, even in things like automatically refunding for downtimes that exceed their 99.5% uptime guarantee (not that there's much of downtime) - something which many hosts not only require you to prove (very hard to do) but often even deny. It's little things like these that increase my confidence in a host and make me willing to trust my website (and credit card number) with them.
Of course there are numerous other features in their hosting packages, but those are fairly standard among most other hosts (like a control panel to manage your email addresses, PHP, Perl, etc), so I'm not going to bother to mention them here. In fact, simply doing a feature versus price comparison of web hosts is not really very useful since most people only use a subset of all features offered (and web hosts know it, and so bloat their feature list to get customers). Far more important, in my opinion, are the above things.
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