Web hosting recommendations?

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I have had a personal website hosted by my ISP for years, with a url of the form www.isp.ie/stuartn, but this element of the broadband package is ending.

Can anyone suggest a stable web hosting company? I happen to be in Ireland, but the host location is probably not important.

I am not looking for anything more complicated than FTP upload of pages that I create myself, and a URL that does not involve me in managing domain name registrations or managing hosting software myself.

I know of a Good free one that I do use for my Blog

http://www.000webhost.com/

Whatever you do, make sure you buy yourself a domain name. It will cost peanuts. (Well... a penny a day.)

Once you have your domain name, just redirect to whatever web host you happen to pick... and change web host as many times as you like, without ever needing to change the web address you use.

You also get to have the domain mail redirected, as well, so no more changes of email address when you change ISP.

I personally would recommend Host Gator. Especially if you do not have the time to learn html/css in-depth.

This seems to be the direction that I am being reluctantly dragged in - I hate the idea of having yet another bill to keep up-to-date and another company to deal with, rather than just a comprehensive broadband package. It also seems like I would be making a lifelong commitment to maintain myname.com or whatever.

Unfortunately, all the included webspace packages have disappeared over time, and all the hosting sites require a domain registration. I was very happy just uploading pages by FTP onto my ISP's domain, synced with my off-line copy.



Is the URL at 000webhost, or do you need to buy a domain registration as well?

Without a domain name of your own, you are making a lifelong commitment to always having to tell people your new email address, and where you are next hosting your data (or just losing them).
With your own domain name, you have no commitment to anyone. You can change the company that acts as registrar whenever you feel like it. Who knows... maybe you can even make millions out of the name, should it become popular. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_nam ... main_names
Ditto. I still haven't found anywhere I feel happy to host my data, so I just host it at home.

Many thanks for your help and excuse my continuing ignorance - I have had my current host for about ten years, and never thought much about domain registrations and so on, especially as my site was number 1 on any relevant search, such as my name. The site has no commercial content, but is important in maintaining my presence and offline commercial income.

Should I register the domain as a single transaction with one company, and then purchase hosting as a separate transaction? I notice that some registration / host companies (like 1&1) appear to tie the domain registration to your account, so it would appear to lapse if you move hosts. ("Select hosting packages include at least 1 domain FREE for the life of your package"). I might just be interpreting this statement over-literally.

I use 1&1 as the registrar for the two domains I "own". I have no other connection to them. I just pay them a few pounds, once a year, to keep the domains registered.

If you buy hosting from them, I gather they do throw in a "free" domain. I don't see any reason you cannot take that domain name with you, should you choose to move to another hosting provider. (There's probably something in the small print of their hosting package contract that says they don't charge for the domain... provided you buy 3/6/12 months hosting in advance.)

I use 123-Reg to hold my domain name and have a different company to host my site. I learned the hard way not to have both the domain name and the hosting held by the same company - my hosting company went belly up and I had difficulty getting my domain name back; so my site was offline for several weeks. Now if my hosting company goes under I simply get another and point my domain (via 123-Reg) to the new servers, upload the files etc and my site is back online again almost immediately.

You can chose hosting from anywhere in the world. I used an American company for a while until their service became appalling (they outsourced to a telecentre in India and they were clueless / unhelpful). I'm now using a company in the UK again.

It makes it more easy to shop around and switch to new hosting companies too if you don't let them hold your domain name for you.

There are lots of packages depending on how much server space and bandwidth you need. Worth shopping around. The biggest weakness I've found of all the hosting companies I've used over the years is email and customer service. Most companies make ridiculous claims of having 99.9999% uptime but in practice this is a lie and it never includes email uptime which tends to crash / be unavailable much more than the site itself.

Beware also what email filtering the hosting companies have. If you are careful with your email addresses then simple hand filtering is all that is needed. Some companies automatically run your emails through various spam cleaning services and in my experience they also strip out some legitimate emails - which can be a serious problem if you are running a business via your site. Better to get 100 spams than lose one decent customer order.

Drifting slightly off topic, but I found several companies unapproachable by email due to draconian email filtering. Recently I tried to contact a computer repair centre near to me and my email kept being bounced back by spamguard / spamsentinel or some similar name. I took my business elsewhere in the end. Bizarrely the UK publication Computer Weekly had the same problem - I wanted to place an advert with them a while ago and my emails kept bouncing back because they contained "offensive material" In the end I decided that basically they were blocking my emails because they were coming from France, there was no other rational explanation. Does Computer Weekly still exist? I gave up on them after that.

And while I'm having a good rant, NTL in the UK used to be appalling for bouncing emails. Several family members and business contacts in the UK used to be with NTL and emails to them would always bounce back after one week as undeliverable because they were considered to be spam. They all had to create Yahoo accounts so they could receive my emails! As far as I could gather NTL were getting lots of spam at the time and their logic was "most spam doesn't originate from the UK" Therefore "Lets block all emails not originating from the UK" Problem solved! They have since changed this rather dumb policy.

with 000webhost you get a random Subdomain
like I have 2 sites through them

My Blog is
http://markitzero.site90.com/

A Project I am working on
http://hldssrcdsmenu.net84.net/

I use NearlyFreeSpeech

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ Great service.

for some sites, and A Small Orange
http://www.asmallorange.com/
for others. Great service too.

Just buy the 5 years package for less than $50 bucks and fuggedabauit.

Avoid free webhosts like the plague, they come and go every day.
Lau comments are full of wisdom btw.

computerlove the thing I use if the Web hosters have a Pay part to were that can make Money then they have the Free hosting on a shared linux box. I have used Free webhosters that have "0" Pay part of there hosting they Die off but the ones that have a way to make money to pay the Bills for power and the backbone

Given your previous postings in this forum, I took this as a recommendation and went with 1&1 and now I have my chosen name registered and functioning. I am overwhelmed with all the options open to me, like up to 1,000 email addresses and multiple domains, so I am keeping it to simply replicating my old site. (I am struggling to redirect my old site - .htaccess is not working, so I probably need to do a broken-web meta refresh, although it has dropped so far down Google that I could just let it die).

Thanks to everyone else for all the helpful suggestions.

uh? Couldnt understan a single word, word.

I've been using GoDaddy.. they offer both hostname registration and web hosting, which is handy, and they are relatively cheap while also allowing a good amount of download and upload bandwidth and overall amount. Even if you don't want to use them for hosting, they are good for hostname registration.

I am currently on a 'shared webhost' which is noticeably slower than say Wikipedia for hosting the same type of wiki, but for a few dollars more you can get a dedicated host which I'm sure would be noticeably faster.

GoDaddy also has an easy-to-use online site manager that will allow you to configure everything you'll probably need - email, various SQL-based database managers (MySQL, others I forget), ...

It does sound somewhat more expensive than some of the options others have mentioned, though, and depending on your website's intended purpose it may be more than you need.

I've used both Hostmonster and GoDaddy. I found Hostmonster a little easier to navigate than GoDaddy, but with GoDaddy I just linked a wordpress account and used wordpress to build my website.

Both of them have good customer service and allowed me to both register a domain name and choose a hosting package. They both also called me within 48 hours of setting up my account to make sure I was figuring everything out ok.