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If you see the phrase send us a link to your GitHub project on a job posting you can be sure GitHub made a back room deal with the job poster

Have you asked these employers if they'll consider repositories on GitLab, Gitea on your VPS, or Gitea on your shared hosting?

Automated renewal is the intent. In practice, it took several months after Let's Encrypt entered public beta for some web hosting providers to let users even upload their own certificates without having to file a support ticket. (See, for example, a blog post from a month ago.) It got so bad that one passive-aggressive fellow wrote a tool to request a certificate from Let's Encrypt and automatically file a support ticket.

I pay 9$ a month for hosting of my projects server through webfaction which is substantially less than any connection I could get that included a static IP. There is really no excuse except ignorance for hosting your website "under your desk" except ignorance. Obviously there are issues with shared hosting for places like hospitals, but once you have to deal with stuff like HIPPA there is even less excuse for under the desk hosting.

Most VPS services must be fully managed by the customer. Improperly managed servers can lead to instability and/or security vulnerabilities. The hidden costs in time and effort can be a hindrance. I was spending more time patching and tweaking my rather pricey Linode instance than I was developing. Managed VPS services are great if you can afford them; I couldn't, and I knew I didn't want to go back to crappy shared hosting, so I started looking for an alternative.

I've been very pleased with WebFaction. It is shared hosting done right. All accounts have guaranteed RAM (shared processes like nginx instances don't count against the soft limit) and Linux cgroups to protect each account from other accounts' CPU and disk IO usage. They don't overload their servers either. You get most of the performance and maintenance benefits of a managed VPS, at the cost of traditional hosting ($9.50/month). Their documentation is good, support is responsive, and software is always up-to-date, so you can stay on the cutting edge. Whatever they don't have, you could always compile/install in your home folder.

A full list of features with links to details can be found at https://www.webfaction.com/features

The best way to see if a host is right for you is to try them. If you are so inclined, please use this referral link: https://www.webfaction.com/?affiliate=seanw

I'd be happy to answer any questions that I can.

Most VPS services must be fully managed by the customer. Improperly managed servers can lead to instability and/or security vulnerabilities. The hidden costs in time and effort can be a hindrance. I was spending more time patching and tweaking my rather pricey Linode instance than I was developing. Managed VPS services are great if you can afford them; I couldn't, and I knew I didn't want to go back to crappy shared hosting, so I started looking for an alternative.

I've been very pleased with WebFaction. It is shared hosting done right. All accounts have guaranteed RAM (shared processes like nginx instances don't count against the soft limit) and Linux cgroups to protect each account from other accounts' CPU and disk IO usage. They don't overload their servers either. You get most of the performance and maintenance benefits of a managed VPS, at the cost of traditional hosting ($9.50/month). Their documentation is good, support is responsive, and software is always up-to-date, so you can stay on the cutting edge. Whatever they don't have, you could always compile/install in your home folder.

A full list of features with links to details can be found at https://www.webfaction.com/features

The best way to see if a host is right for you is to try them. If you are so inclined, please use this referral link: https://www.webfaction.com/?affiliate=seanw

I'd be happy to answer any questions that I can.

Did you know that Apache will execute compiled C binaries and that you can simply read and write from STDIN & STDOUT to do CGI?

I was aware of that, in an environment that gives the user at least as much control as a VPS. But did you know that some providers' cheapest plans do not support C CGI, only PHP? This restriction is part of why I left Go Daddy shared hosting for WebFaction shared hosting.

Do the same on my mobile & tablets too -- Just run full-on Linux. Use compiled "apps" to get's tons more battery life than when it had Android on it.

Which brand of phone and tablet do you use, and where can I try them in a store in the United States? And how much more battery life do your tablets get than the eight hours that I get out of a Nexus 7?

If you do need a host that will babysit those processes for you, I strongly recommend WebFaction. They have the best support, best documentation and easiest management console for deploying multiple sites that I've ever had from any host, hands-down. They give you guaranteed memory, shell access, the ability to compile your own code on the server and a low number of accounts-per-server (meaning noticebly faster page-loads than my previous host). Under $10/month.

PHP gets widespread hosting support for exactly one reason: mod_php. This is why it's impossible to run two PHPs at once, and why hosters are slow to upgrade.

For one thing, two Apaches in two virtual machines can run two PHPs. For another, even if you don't run your app servers in virtual machines, you can still mount customer files on a file server and switch the user from the app server that handles 5.2 to the app server that handles 5.4.

Compare the number of companies willing to install an apache module and just forget it (often to their peril) to the number of companies willing to babysit a million RAM-chewing django, rails, and java servlets for all their customers, and that's why.

Which is part of why after this discussion I moved my own site from Go Daddy to WebFaction. It has Rails, Django, and other common frameworks as one-click installs alongside a more "typical" configuration with CGI and PHP, if I ever need them.

Someone should resurrect mod_python.

Its successor is mod_wsgi, but what advantage does this have over, say, FastCGI?

Webfaction

The main point is performance. Ryan Dahl wanted to write fast, scalable servers easily. We all know for years that threads don't scale but event loops do (see the second chart of memory consumption of apache vs nginx). Of course in order to have a highly concurrent evented server you can't use blocking system calls (which were a big mistake in my opinion to begin with - they are the only reason why you needed threads exposed at the application level for concurrency in the past). OK, so we want a portable, high performance, event-based, async-I/O, scalable, highly concurrent server. The obvious way to write such servers in a portable, OS-independent way was to write them in C using libraries like libev or libevent for event loops and libeio for non-blocking I/O. The result is great. But the problem is that it is not easy. C doesn't have lambdas, anonymous functions, closures or higher-order functions in a real sense, which all would make writing event handlers much easier. So Ryan was looking for a higher level language and found V8, the JavaScript virtual machine written by Google for Chrome. JavaScript has anonymous functions and closures. And V8 is fast. And also when you write JavaScript in the browser then you never use blocking function calls anyway, so people are already familiar with asynchronous I/O, events, callbacks, closures, futures and promises. Hell, you can even use Y combinators in JavaScript if you know your craft. Now, if only JavaScript had lazy evaluation and proper tail call optimization - maybe some day. Watch some talks by Ryan Dahl if you're interested and after 25 years in the field you should be. Oh, and Node doesn't have anything to do with the browser besides the V8 origins. It's all server-side. See the Wikipedia article on Node for more info and code examples. I'm glad that people who have been professionally programing for so many years are still willing to broaden their horizons. As I have written in the past it is not a universal property of programmers unfortunately. Have fun with new tools.

For domains you could try Gandi or Hover, both of which generally get high marks.
Gandi is a French company, so that should give some protection against trigger-happy US companies.

As for hosting there's certainly plenty to choose from, but I'm quite happy with WebFaction. It's even one of the few shared hosts that tells you how much memory you can use (upgradeable). As long as you don't intend to do reselling they're hard to go wrong with.
It's a UK company, but their servers are in Texas (at The Planet).

webfaction.com

Also have someone else host all your servers unless a file server is needed. There are plenty of good server hosts out there. For the web, depends on what you want. Pair is a top notch web host I used for many years. Top flight quality in every regard. Hostgator is who I use now to save some money and I'm perfectly satisfied. It works well, is reasonably fast, and they don't bitch that I do like 100GB of traffic a month.

Indeed. Hosting your own servers is just silly, considering the many (affordable) options out there.

As for specifics:

• HostGator -- Never used them myself, but seems to be fairly good for what they are: A massively oversold shared hosting. And remember: There's no such thing as unlimited bandwidth.
• DreamHost -- Much like HostGator, except opinions seems to be even more split. Many will recommend them - just as many will tell you horror story upon horror story.
  Seems like it's a good place to avoid for anything important.
• WebFaction -- Where I eventually ended up. (Supposedly) not oversold and full non-root shell access. Feature-wise the next step up would be a full-blown VPS. It's a UK company with UK support hours, but the servers are hosted with The Planet in Texas.
  Don't think I have seen anything but positive comments concerning them.
  (And yes - that's an affiliate link)

But go look here for more: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

I have been around the web hosting block a few times. I've been with a lot of bad hosts, hosts that have gone under, and some good hosts. The top of my list are

WebFaction

A Small Orange

I liked A Small Orange a lot but went to WebFaction because it was so much easier to set up web-based applications. They have django, ruby, pylons, and a bunch of others installable with a few clicks. They are also willing to install other packages that you need and will do so and respond quickly. Some of my sites use LaTeX and imagemagick and it is great having a host that provides these packages and isn't restrictive. I have also not had any issues of busy servers and/or downtime that have plagued some other hosts.

I have been VERY pleased with Webfaction. They are basically a bunch of geeks that make web hosting a pleasure for other geeks. Their servers have all the latest tools, dev packages, and they have an automated application install for over 20 different applications (PHP, Ruby, Python, etc etc). Their support system is fast and competent, and I've learned a ton on their community forums.

If they don't have a particular app that you want, it's not that difficult to download and install it yourself.

http://www.webfaction.com/

If you DO decide to join, don't be afraid to use me as your referrer: http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=mantic

I have been VERY pleased with Webfaction. They are basically a bunch of geeks that make web hosting a pleasure for other geeks. Their servers have all the latest tools, dev packages, and they have an automated application install for over 20 different applications (PHP, Ruby, Python, etc etc). Their support system is fast and competent, and I've learned a ton on their community forums.

If they don't have a particular app that you want, it's not that difficult to download and install it yourself.

http://www.webfaction.com/

If you DO decide to join, don't be afraid to use me as your referrer: http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=mantic

They may be buzzword-happy, but they are serious about their datacenter. Okay, EV1s datacenter anyway... http://www.webfaction.com/hardware "Redundant UPS systems, generator backup, VESPA detection systems, closed circuit monitoring of all areas and entrances, 24 hour guard manned security and redundant a/c systems" I'm glad they keep those damn motorscooters from terrorizing customer servers. I'd have to worry about them if they didn't.