Forbidden Donut

$5-10 a month is definitely going to be tight. I'm not saying it is impossible to find something of better quality than hostgator at that price range, but your options will definitely be few and far between. Out of curiosity, what problem do you have with shared hosts like that?

If you're willing to jump up in a price a bit, then I definitely recommend a VPS of some kind. Linode (linode.com) is by far the best VPS I've seen out there. The flexibility it provides is pretty much endless, and its servers are unimaginably fast to boot (not literally; well...yes literally, but you know what I mean). I've worked with dedicated boxes that haven't come close to the quality of my simple linode.

can you link me to a domain on your linode?

I know Court will kill some kittens when I mention my host: 1and1.com. I have zero real issues with them besides the lack of control since it's not a VPS as he uses. It has all the features that you need and they are really quite cheap. I believe I have my main domain (finalcreations.net) through GoDaddy and my second domain (zestfule.com) through them but I can't remember. The packages say they come with a domain registration but I can't imagine it's required. Their smallest plan is $3.99/month (first 6 months are $1.99). And it is certainly overkill when it comes to space/features you are talking about.

And Court, I made the mistake of taking advantage of the free domain name and ended up with a lost domain. I moved a couple of times because of the downtime. I would guess most of the shared hosting lie about 99.9% because that would mean any server would only be down less than 12 hours a year. Moreover, when I was on lunarpages, I was on one of the older servers, Sirona, and they never upgraded that POS (including the os, ridic). The server also had some protocol that deleted ftp account and I would have to ask them to reset it using support which often took hours, and a few times days. Cancellation was like trying to bargain with Italian street vendors. I have had similar experiences in 2 other hosts. In short, I'm tired of hosts that oversell their shared servers that have a huge list of features, because it usually means they've sacrificed hardware, routing, customer service, loyalty, and admins.

To Erling & any1 else who'd used 1&1. They're domain registration is ridiculously cheap. Is it any good?

Well, I haven't had any issues with the domain - not even sure how you could have issues with a domain registration. Their beginner package includes a domain for free (and I see nothing about it only being free for the initial registration). I've also never seen my site down, I suppose it's gone down from time to time without me noticing as I'm the only one who currently uses it.

Just went and took a peek and my initial domain is free as long as I keep my hosting with them as it's included in the package. My secondary domain is through them as well and costs me the normal price. Again, I'm not sure what kind of issues you could have with a domain registration - could you be more specific?

P.S. - Looks like for .coms and such it's $6.99 for the first year and $8.99 for the following years.

godaddy for example has been known to suspend DNS services for random reasons. it would be pretty stupid however, for hosts like 1&1 to suspend DNS for ppl who use their webservers. no worries any who, because i'm probably not transferring to 1&1. i just wanted know how it was.

It sucks that you tried the free domain option. A lot of hosting providers offer it, but it's never a good idea (for the reasons you discovered).

Out of 40-some shared hosts that I've used over the years, 1and1 was by far one of my least favorites. We tried it for the FD site when it was at its peak traffic, and we had constant problems with our SMTP server dropping out and the pages being served up really slow at peak times. We switched to them after going with some smaller web hosts that turned out to be awful (one of which I can easily label as the worst web host I've ever used), so they had to be pretty bad for us not to think they were at least worth trying out for a bit longer. I think we switched off of them and to lunarpages after less than 30 days.

I do use and still recommend godaddy to people for domain name registration (definitely not web hosting though). I have also heard some problems about people having issues with them, but having no issues myself across perhaps 100 different domains that I have registered myself or have registered for clients, I've brushed the complaints off as something any industry-leading registrar is going to have. I've never used 1and1's domain registration, so I don't know how good it is. I can't really use my negative experience with their hosting as a judgment factor because I know godaddy has awful web hosting as well.

http://swigg.net/ is running on a linode right now, but it only exists as a development space for the time being. My personal and professional domains (courtewing.com and epixa.com respectively) were running on linodes but are currently parked on hostgator while I do some release testing for PHP 5.3. I'm sorry I do not have a production site running there, but feel free to ping it or whatever. Also, linode has no setup fee and a 7 day money back guarantee, so you've always got that.

The one thing with linode is that it is nearly entirely unmanaged. Their control panel lets you set up partitions and install an operating system as well as monitor your resource use, but everything else is up to you. If you're the type of person that likes limitless control of your system, then you will fall in love with linode. If you're the type of person that wants someone else to handle apache and PHP configuration or wants someone's help when you fuck them up yourself, then it's not for you.