I’ve been piggy backing of my little brother’s hosting plan now for a couple of years. I got a message from him yesterday to say he was shutting it down as he doesn’t use it anymore.
I don’t want to take his plan over since he has the full-bells-and-whistles-unlimited-everything plan with Hostgator.
So, I’m looking for somewhere fairly basic to host this site. The Hatchling Plan over at Hostgator (I have enjoyed their service – albeit for free!) seems like a good deal – especially if I pre-pay for 3 years in advance.
Inmotion is also reasonable (decent plan), but a little more expensive, however their month to month price is better.
So fellow bloggers, pass along any hosting recommendations if you have them. I need to get something up and running soon. Thanks for your help!
Alastair.
p.s. No Andrew, I don’t want to host it myself.
I’ve used BlueHost for a long time and I’ve had a great experience with them. Their basic web hosting is $4.95/mo. BlueHost is shared web hosting and that’s really it – if you use more than your allotted resources (they say ‘unlimited’, but it’s really not – only dedicated server hosting is really unlimited), they throttle your account. You still get unlimited bandwidth, but that bandwidth moves ridiculously slowly. My site load times were averaging 9-10 seconds when they were throttling my account.
When Worship Tutorials outgrew them I went with Site5 because they’ll scale up as your traffic grows. I’ve been very happy with Site5 so far – nothing but great things to say about them. They also have a “Resource Usage” metric so you can actually see how many ‘resources’ you’re using up if you’re sharing a server. This is handy for knowing when you need to upgrade your plan. Site5′s basic shared hosting plan is also $4.95/mo. If it were me, I’d got with them from the start.
I noticed that HostGator will scale all the way up to dedicated server hosting as well, so it seems like a very similar thing as Site5.
You know, you could always host it yourself
Thanks Brian!! Will definitely check out Site5, I had not heard of them before.
Found another company called iPage. Reviews look too good to be true. Why is it so hard to find authentic reviews of web hosting companies? It’s crazy.
I hear you. Any time I did any research on hosting companies I felt like hardly anything I read was authentic. Strange business…
I just recently switched to HostGator (the Hatchling plan) from another host. I’ve been super pleased with their customer service and assistance in getting stuff transfered over. In fact, they took care of transferring my blog from the old host to their server for me as part of the plan. Can’t comment on long term speed or anything like that yet, but I’ve heard good things. Also ended up paying not much more for three years than what I was paying yearly at my previous host.
Hi Chris, thanks! I went ahead and did the same today. Did you use their transfer for moving your site and content over? I have kicked that off, but not sure how it’s going to work.
Yeah, I used their transfer service. They’ll ask a few question, you provide some information (I had to give them the ftp login for my old host), and they move the content to their server. They then send you a link to check the site out that’s temporary to make sure everything is working before it goes fully live. I found it to be incredibly smooth and hassle-free. Plus a whole lot easier than trying to do it myself.
Good to hear!
All transitioned to Hostgator (new hatchling account). They took care of the whole migration. Excellent service.