2-webhosting.com

I’m looking to move away from a crappy host and so I’m looking for one to host my minor, small, blog. To start with, anyway, depending on how good the host is.

Also, I’m a moderator over at the WordPress.org support forums and we get questions from time to time on what the best hosts are. Of course, everybody has their own opinion, but I’m kind of curious about this myself now, so I figured I’d go to a more specific forum for answers, so I can be able to give them myself in the future.

Here’s exactly what I’m looking for:

• Very small amounts of storage (most likely under 200 MB).
• Very small amounts of bandwidth (almost always under 1 GB per month, potentially 3-5 GB maximum in normal cases).
• PHP 5.
• At least 1-2 MySQL databases (and willingness to upgrade it when MySQL has a serious bug, like 5.0.51 does)
• Being willing not to screw me if I get slashdotted/dugg/what have you. In other words, if I suddenly get a gigantic, but temporary, spike in traffic for a reason like this, I don’t want to get a bill for that traffic, or get my site shut down. If it’s ongoing for more than a month, then fair enough, we can talk about increasing the costs, but a transient spike like this should not cost me anything at all. To be fair, if you want me to advertise your services when a spike happens, I’m game.
• Non-crippled PHP. I hate it when something I’m writing fails because the host is crippled. fopen should work properly, damnit.
• Non-firewall-screwed boxes. If I want a script to check an external service like google or check email on some other site, then it should be able to do it. If it’s doing it too often or bogging down, then tell me instead of crippling the damn thing. I am perfectly capable of fixing it or disabling it until I can fix it, give me that chance to do so.
• No “CPU Limits”. I hate companies that offer huge hosting packages and then the site never works because you exceeded the CPU Limit. Again, if it’s causing a load problem, tell me. We’ll work it out. I always use smart caching solutions anyway, so 95% of the traffic will be served from static files.

So, there you go. I’ve looked at A Small Orange, and everybody here seems to like MediaLayer, but I can’t tell if they fit these types of requirements. Also MediaLayer only seems to take Paypal, which I found damned odd.

Any recommendations?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 8:09 am and is filed under Web Hosting.