web hosting companies reviewed
Here find summarized our experiences with some hosting providers. In most cases we have worked on more than one site on each host, and maintained them over a period of a couple years.
Lunarpages.com
Lunarpages has excellent uptime and support for shared hosting. They have cpanel interface, phpmyadmin but no shell access. Overall, I'd say they offer the best overall shared hosting in terms of performance, service and uptime. Some of our biggest projects are hosted at lunarpages.
Dreamhost.com
Dreamhost.com is the best cheap web host (once you get past the set up fee). We have hosted on their least expensive plan for a few years, which now includes unlimited domains, unlimited mysql databases and ridiculous bandwidth. Now for the catch! Uptime is very good but they have occasional server, dns and network issues, all of which are documented in their blog. Support is pretty good: they respond quickly and are knowledgeable. I don't really remember a time when I had to submit a ticket more than once to get something fixed. They have a custom panel for managing your account and domains which is better than any other web interface I've used. You can request shell access. Dreamhost.com is the best place to host a site if you are on a tight budget. Moreover its a very programmer-friendly environment.
Siteground.com
Good uptime, and good support, but personally I'd host at dreamhost.com or lunarpages.com before going here. When I set up a subdomain once I was kinda disappointed that really its a folder under the parent domain, rather than its own web directory. Maybe this is standard for low price hosting environments. Dreamhost.com allows you to create what I would call real subdomains, complete w/ its own user, directory heirarchy, etc.
m5hosting.com
If you are looking for a dedicated server and awesome support look no further than m5hosting.com. They can set up a server to your specifications including OS and partition sites. The support is fantastic. This is your best choice for a dedicated server. I cannot comment on their other hosting plans (shared hosting, etc).
softlayer.com
This pretty much turned me off from ever wanting to have anything to do at softlayer.com. Had a simple support issue that took about 10 ticket revisions to get resolved. Every time they "fixed" it, it still didn't work. You would think they would actually verify the situation was fixed rather than claim its fixed when in fact it was not. They charge for support incidents. A week after the initial ticket, turns out in process of doing their "fix" the server ended up having php but without mysql support compiled in. So that was another support ticked to get php recompiled, and basically getting php working the was it was before the first support issue. Host at softlayer.com at your own risk, but I do not recommend it.
godaddy.com
Inexpensive hosting for people who need no-frills. The phpmyadmin interface was buggy, but that probably more the phpmyadmin than godaddy. If your URLs don't end in some kind of file extension, like .jpg, .html, etc, it won't work and the server will serve a 404 response, even if you are trying to use mod_rewrite to direct the URL to some page. I learned this the hard way.
100webspace.com
This is really a great find: free web hosting. Or, for like $1 per month you can have an ads-free website with php, perl, and a mysql database. Only downside is no SMTP access. The server uptime is good and support is good; overall no-frills hosting for sites with small bandwidth requirements. Check out 100webspace.com.
