Web hosting?

[johnree]

With a fairly bit of html and photoshop knowledge I believe I am ready to create a website of my own showcasing my photographs.
What is the best web hosting site out there that is also reliable and great on prices?

I heard media temple is one of the top ones out there.
Ive also come across a web hosting the is basically 4 dollars a month with unlimited everything, free domain and the whole package. Something seems wrong there?

[naeno]

I've used godaddy. com with great success. They run specials all the time too.

[dakwegmo]

You'll hear good and bad things about every web hosting company out there. I've used dozens and even worked for a few. The $5 / month isn't unreasonable given how cheap computer hardware has become. I've had an account with DreamHost for over two years. When I first signed up, they had a deal that was $10 for 1 year of hosting. I bought it thinking it would just be a sandbox to play around in, but I ended up liking it so much I moved my sites and all of my clients websites over.

[Photologyst]

Thanks for the thread. I am also looking for a new host. There are tons out there. There are days when I think one's own server is the answer.

Originally Posted by naeno

I've used godaddy. com with great success. They run specials all the time too.

I have had very poor experience with GoDaddy.

They tend to hold domains hostage for exorbitant prices. They have “loss-leader” prices and at the end of the term things go UP.

Would never use them again for anything!

[Jim Bryant]

Exposuremanager.com is only about $95 per year vice photoshelter, which is one of the better ones on the market at $600.00 per year.

[bhursey]

Originally Posted by dakwegmo

You'll hear good and bad things about every web hosting company out there. I've used dozens and even worked for a few. The $5 / month isn't unreasonable given how cheap computer hardware has become. I've had an account with DreamHost for over two years. When I first signed up, they had a deal that was $10 for 1 year of hosting. I bought it thinking it would just be a sandbox to play around in, but I ended up liking it so much I moved my sites and all of my clients websites over.

I have dream host also.. unlimited everything. I really never had any down time. The unlimited happy hosting is 118 a year. well worth it if you know how to program. You got unlimited space, bandwidth, databases, sub domains, unlimited emails... You also get ruby, php language support along with standard web languages. The support is amazing. Before I hosted my own servers and I can not find anything I cant do on dreamhost.

[dakwegmo]

Originally Posted by Jim Bryant

Exposuremanager.com is only about $95 per year vice photoshelter, which is one of the better ones on the market at $600.00 per year.

Two completely different beasts, but it's a good idea to use something like this for selling images online. If you use your own hosting for this, you'll end up paying a lot more to get your SSL certificate, Merchant Account, Secure Gateway, Shopping cart software etc.

Originally Posted by bhursey

I have dream host also.. unlimited everything. I really never had any down time. The unlimited happy hosting is 118 a year. well worth it if you know how to program. You got unlimited space, bandwidth, databases, sub domains, unlimited emails... You also get ruby, php language support along with standard web languages. The support is amazing. Before I hosted my own servers and I can not find anything I cant do on dreamhost.

I used to run my own servers too,but for the price, the features, and the convenience of not having to be constantly managing a web server, DreamHost is well worth it. I should have mentioned the price, but I have a number of addons that I pay for, that are still well below what the servers I had before were running me and I don't have to deal with them when they break.

[klausson]

It all depends on what you need. If all you require is a place to keep your html and image files, you need to look for the cheapest deal with reasonable space allowance. If traffic becomes an issue, keep a close watch on how your hosting company charges you for "excess traffic" above the limit they set for you. If you need additional functionality like a pre-packaged CMS or shopping cart, some of the better hosting companies will run them in a managed environment for you and usually also even give you scheduled backups that you can transfer to offsite locations.

In the no-frills hosting category, price is probably the most important factor and you'll just need to make sure that you have a full backup of everything so that you can move your presence to the next outfit in case the one that gave you the cheapest price yesterday is no longer around tomorrow (a likely outcome).

The more functionality you package into "hosting", the more you will require decent support and in this case I'd much rather pay a little more and get prompt and accurate responses. I have used quite a few hosting services in the past and definitely one of the better ones in the support category is EApps in Atlanta (eApps.com - Web Hosting for Demanding Customers). They are not the cheapest, but I'd rather pay more and know that I'll get to speak to a knowledgeable support person when I need them.

Another option is to host your work with one of the portfolio companies rather than doing the work yourself. Photoshelter and Zenfolio are some of the better ones. Picasa is good and free of charge. Flickr seems to be what everybody uses but I think it's hard to get your own identity into either a Flickr or Picasa page.

[johnree]

Great! thanks for the feedback. Gives me more to think on what I want and what i need.

Thanks
John Lee

[Eastree]

Originally Posted by Photologyst

Thanks for the thread. I am also looking for a new host. There are tons out there. There are days when I think one's own server is the answer.



I have had very poor experience with GoDaddy.

They tend to hold domains hostage for exorbitant prices. They have “loss-leader” prices and at the end of the term things go UP.

Would never use them again for anything!

I'll second this. Their initial price for registering a domain is already way too high.

If someone complains about your web site, they're likely to take it down and let you ask the questions later.

IIRC, their terms of use at least used to be that they were providing the service of allowing you to "purchase" a domain and hosting through them, but they owned the name, not you, and held the ability to do with the site what they wanted -- which explains their readiness to take down web sites which receive complaints. It's why people who post anything even slightly controversial tend to avoid GoDaddy

Want an example? This is fairly typical:
godaddy sucks!

Oh, and if someone ever marks your email as spam ... or, something that happened with my previous (personal) domain, someone spoofs the domain to send mass spam ...
Godaddy Holding Customer Sites to Ransom? | Threadwatch.org

So we sent a request for a link trade to the wrong guy and he reported it as spam. Now Godaddy suspended 24 domains and is asking $199 each to get them back, a total of $4776 USD.
The dns is redirected to godaddy abusednsblah so we get a 404 page and our domains are down and losing money. (there's a bit more but that's the meat of it)