web hosts

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It's one of my New Year's resolution to start a website for my artwork, writing and music. It's been 5 years since the last time I built and maintained a website, and I had help and more resources then. Not only am I rusty, I'm behind on a lot of recent things adn I'm doing this on my own now, so I'm pretty intimidated. So good advice and "go here to get/do X" pointers would be very helpful.

But for starters, what can you guys advise me about web hosts? Is there one you can recommend? Ones I should avoid? Alternatives?

I definitely need my own domain name. Is there anything recent about this I need to be clued in on?

I doubt I'll have much traffic so I'm not worried about bandwidth, but I don't want too little. As the start I doubt I'll have more than 50MB of downloadable media on the site, but I do want to allow streaming for MP3s.

I've had a lot of webhosts in the past. My current one is DreamHost -- I really couldn't be any happier with them. Very accountable, customer-centric, reliable, and straight-forward. Good deal. Lots of hosts have lame restrictions and rules and don't tell you when they go down, but DreamHost isn't like that. If you want a deal, btw, I can get you a discount code.

The big problem I've had with webhosts in the past is stuff going down. One thing I like about Dreamhost is they really sweat it and even have an off-site status page where you can check what's going on.

I would recommend buying a domain name separately, however. Any reasonable place is gonna offer dot coms for somewhere around $10. I'm pretty happy with godaddy.com for that, but some people say their support is bad. It's a good idea to get a domain name from a domain name company rather than your host, that way you're not limited in any way. Likewise, don't buy hosting from a domain company.

Dreamhost is pretty good.

Ive heard a lot of bad things of people leaving 1and1. I didnt have much trouble signed their contract and mailed it in and a week later my site was dead and I was no longer billed.

Thanks Nuttdan. That's very helpful. I'll look into Dreamhost, and get back to you about that discount code - I'd PM you my email but I can't get into my WP PM indox at the moment for some reason.

I was wondering about buying a domain name from a domain name registry or from the webhost. I'll take your word - that makes the most sense.

Again thanks - I'll probably have more questions in the near future.

Cade,have a look here: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ it's a huge scale site/community for finding reviews [bad and good] of [non free] webhosts,and deals.
If have a hosts name,enter it in their search page,and it'll come up with threads about them.


I agree about domains,if it's bought through the host,they can have a hold over it,and the site owner is at their mercy,won't matter if it isn't important to the person though.

Cool site. Thanks!