Need Web-Hosting?

If you need web-hosting, based on my five years of customer experience, I recommend checking out Jaguar PC.

(Ethical note: If you sign up using this link, I get a small amount of money. However, I've been recommending JaguarPC for years without getting any money.)

Web-hosting is a very mysterious business. Unfortunately it is general practice to over-sell - namely a company will sell you a plan for around $10/month that will give you more disk space and bandwidth than 95-99% of users will ever need. Their business model counts upon most people not using it. So if you are actually planning on using what anywhere near what a web-host is offering you in a plan, you are risking slowing down the server that you are on, or angering your host, and you should probably upgrade to a better plan.

Things can go fine for a couple years, or you can have a several day outage that takes your site down for a long time (aka several days). A single company can have 10-1000 servers, so performance will vary dramatically for each client. Overall it is hard to know whether a company is good or not.

I think the only good way to ensure hosting reliability is to get a dedicated server from a good company, so that you are the only person using it, and either get it to be managed or manage it yourself (and for this you must be a linux expert). That said, I haven't actually tried that out. So for the rest of us, there is cheap shared hosting... and if you are going to go that route, you're probably as good off with Jaguar as with anyone else. They have a decent group of users (see the discussion forums), and are generally doing a good job, though they sometimes make stupid mistakes (or the hardware makes stupid mistakes).

If you don't believe me that Jaguar PC is good, or if you really want to look into this topic, visit WebhostingTalk.com - the leading forum on the topic with over two million posts. Note that people are most likely to talk about webhosts when they have problems, so the forum is full of stories of problems. That said, there are some reasonable people who will try to balance it out by giving companies favourable recommendations. Searching for a company's name in that forum will give you a good idea of how good they are.