Call for web hosting advice
Hey Internet, I need some advice. I’ve been using Yahoo as a hosting provider for about a year and I’ve been largely happy. I’ve been very impressed by their ability to weave together a bunch of independent services and software into one very reasonable control panel and make the common things pretty easy. For new users of such things, I would still recommend it. But in the last couple months, I’ve gotten increasingly frustrated with a few aspects of the Yahoo service.
First, I’ve been trying to set up a sitemap for this blog (on WordPress, running at a subdomain mapped into a folder). Yahoo does not allow access to any url rewriting files and without that, it is not possible (according to them) for me to install a sitemap anywhere that can be seen or is valid for this blog. It still may be possible, but I’m tired of messing with it. For similar reasons, I have not been able to switch my feeds to feedburner.
The last straw is that over the past week or so, I’ve been getting a ton of 500 errors on the site. Yahoo support is slow at best (takes days to get a first response) so I’m not sure whether this is something that will get resolved or not. In any case, the current level of problems is unacceptable.
So, I’m looking at other hosting providers, but there are so many zillions of them that I have to rely on some sort of personal recommendation, which is where you come in. I have relatively modest space and bandwidth requirements, probably well within any basic plan’s limits. I need MySQL, PHP, WordPress (preferably installed for me), email, subdomains, and FTP/SCP, backups – all pretty basic. Java and/or Ruby support would be nice although I have no need for it right now. I would love to have WordPress installed/updated automatically and backups done automatically. And I want great support in the case that stuff breaks.
So, any thoughts? Please, only recommend something if you’ve actually used it, not if you’ve just heard about it.
Hi! My name is Alex Miller and I live in St. Louis. I write code for a living and currently work for 
I use BlueHost (http://www.bluehost.com) for my WordPress blog. They also support Ruby on Rails, Python, Perl and PHP along with a plethora of other features. They claim to do mirrored backups, but they don’t list the details. I need to look into that sometime. :) The best two things about BlueHost are the support, which is very responsive, and the low price.
I personally pay for site5′s services, on recommendation of others at my work, and have convinced 3 others to sign up for them as well.
55 gigabytes of disk storage. 5 terabytes of transfer per month. That should be enough for just about anything.
mySQL, check. PHP and WordPress (installed through Fantastico’s interface), check. Email, subdomains, FTP/SCP, check.
Backups .. check. Something even better, too: “Flashback”, going back in time to previous revisions of files.
Support, never really needed it, but I read the forums regularly and people seem to love it.
I used to run my own ISP/web hosting firm, and recommended site5 to my own customers as well: better services with higher uptime than I could provide for a lesser cost.
I have an affiliate link if you want it. . . but I’d prefer you just evaluate them yourself and sign up directly. :)
I too use Yahoo, and I’ve seen 500 errors from time-to-time. I reported it in the past, and basically received a denial that it was happening at all. One of these days I should switch, I just haven’t gotten around to doing so.
Well, I just switched over after using this guide: http://1nf0rmat10n.com/webhosting … Yahoo’s not bad, but frankly: any company that has hosting as sub-section of what they do is suspect
I was actively searching the net for some web hosting advice and found this site:http://besthostingreview.org.I found that Bluehost is quite good host with good plans compared to other web hosting service providers in the net.There is only plan to choose and that makes it easier to sign up for blue host web hosting services.
Bluehost is a nice service provide. Good luck