Hosting a Website

May 10, 2009 9:53 PM

Best place to host a website, cheap?

Hello Everyone,
I am very new to the world of website design and I am looking for a hosting service and some basic tools. I've looked at godaddy and a few others and it looks like they have a lot of prebuilt templates,etc. I am looking to understand web-design in a more archaic way(don't ask). I would like to be able to buld my directory, ftp files, etc. What hosting serivce would you recommend? I am currently using tripod.com, but there are too many advertisements there.

Thanks much!
Ksu

posted by Ksu to computers & internet (9 comments total)

nearlyfreespeech.net is almost certainly exactly what you want. You only pay for what you use, and it's very well run.

Whatever you do, don't use GoDaddy for anything, not even for registering domains.
posted by blasdelf at 10:00 PM on May 10

NearlyFreeSpeech is probably as cheap as it gets for good, basic web hosting.
posted by zsazsa at 10:01 PM on May 10

I love NearlyFreeSpeech and yeah it's almost free.
posted by grobstein at 10:14 PM on May 10

At $10 per GB stored and $1 per GB transferred, NearlyFreeSpeech is cheap if you need PHP, but if you just need storage and serving of static files, and you have an Amazon account, you can't beat their S3 service: 15¢ per GB stored, 17¢ per GB transferred, and 1¢ per 10,000 GET requests.
posted by nicwolff at 10:52 PM on May 10

another vote for nearlyfreespeech.
been a customer for more than a year and no regrets!

my sites are very light traffic btw.
so others can speak for nearlyfreespeech traffic handling capability.
posted by shalam at 11:04 PM on May 10

http://www.000webhost.com is free, provides ftp access, php, and mySQL. And they don't seem to put up any ads, unless they're directing their own traffic to my site somehow and wrapping ads in via frames. So I don't get how they stay in business but it's hefty enough to support a light-traffic Drupal installation with several other PHP applications installed.
posted by XMLicious at 11:33 PM on May 10

personally i tried 000webhost.com and it was great to start with - it works and my website run 2 weeks seamlessly on it. then one night the website was down all night and another night my website was gone (i had it backed up!)

i then moved to dreamhost.com because there was an offer - 10$ for a full year - and even though it also went down one night, it is so much faster than 000webhost was.
posted by madeinitaly at 5:10 AM on May 11

WebFaction is great. They have reasonable prices and great support as well as very powerful services.
posted by stevechemist at 12:35 PM on May 11

I've been incredibly happy with Pair for the past decade or so. Their most basic plan is $6/month, with a discount if you prepay. I tried hosting with another company & went scurrying back after my site was down for about 2 days straight.
posted by MesoFilter at 8:39 PM on May 11