Things To Look For In a Web Hosting Company?

v1x writes "I have had an account with my current web hosting company for a few years, with 3 domains being hosted there (using Linux/PHP/MySQL). Recently, all three of these websites stopped functioning, and upon checking the site, all my directory structures were intact, whereas all of the files were gone. Upon contacting their technical support, I was given the run-around, and later informed by one of their administrators that none of the files could be restored. Needless to say that I am looking for a different web hosting company at this point, but I would like to make a more informed choice than I did with the current company. I have read a similar Slashdot article (from 2005) on the topic, but the questions posed there were slightly different." Reader mrstrano has a similar question: "I am developing a web application and, after registering the domain, I am now looking for a suitable web hosting provider. It should be cheap enough so I can start small, but should allow me to scale up if the web site is successful (as I hope). The idea is simple enough so I do not need other investors to implement it. This also means that I don't have a lot of money to put on it at the moment. Users of the website will post their pictures (no, it's not going to be a porn website), so scalability might be an issue even with a moderately high number of users. I would like to find a good web hosting provider from day one, so I don't have to go through the pain of a data migration. Which web host would you choose?"

Comments

Re:Things I look for

[TooMuchToDo]

Amazon S3 charged $153.60/month to store 1TB of data. That doesn't count the cost to get the data into S3 or to get it back out. Storage (disk) is cheap. Power, network, and cooling for that storage costs something, as does redundancy (1TB is really 2TB of storage if you want it redundant).

Something like Linode / Slicehost

[01101010001010001010]

Check out Linode.com - they are very good if you know what you are doing. It's a small outfit that has grown rapidly. It's Xen-based hosting and linux-based. Very good value for money and great service. One downside is that the backup program is still in beta, which makes me nervous as hell. For a little bit more money there's Slicehost, who I think are now owned by Rackspace. The price/performance isn't as good as Linode, but they have proper backups. I'm reluctantly looking to move over there. I'd only recommend one of those two if you are happy with command-line administration of a server / installation of packages etc. Cheers

Re:wow, offtopic, really?

[drinkypoo]

I've heard that justhost uses naughty practices in their advertising. Can anyone shed some light on what kind of underhanded marketing practices are being used by justhost, so that we can watch out for other hosting providers which might do the same nefarious things?