ISPs: Who do I choose?

davidbarry

(This is part of another thread I had in H/A, but I figured it's tech enough to ask here as well)

So, I'm building a website for my band which has been an experience, to say the least.

I'm finally at a point where I need to choose an ISP for both the registration of my domain name and the hosting of my site. Seeing as how there are a million different ISP's to choose from, I thought I come here and see what you trustworthy PA guys deem to be trustworthy ISPs.

In terms of what I need, the site is very simple (consisting of 5 pages) and the heaviest amount of data it'll be dealing with is our band's mp3's. (Right now, it's only 50 megs of stuff, by end of june, that'll balloon to around 150)

Zetx

I use namecheap.com and asmallorange.com (domain registration and web hosting, respectively)

I've been with ASO for a couple years now, and I like 'em just fine.

(edit: Oh and you can probably google up some coupons for namecheap...)

davidbarry

Zetx wrote: »

I use namecheap.com and asmallorange.com (domain registration and web hosting, respectively)

I've been with ASO for a couple years now, and I like 'em just fine.

(edit: Oh and you can probably google up some coupons for namecheap...)

Thanks. They get major points for their own domain name (asmallorange, that is). I'll check 'em out now.

Edit: Wow, their pricing options are awesome. Thanks alot. Found a coupon that'll save me 15% as well.

Monoxide

ISP typically refers to the person who you get your internet connection from, the word you're looking for here is "hosting company"

I just canceled my account with Surpass Hosting (because I'm broke, not because anything was wrong with it) and they've been pretty great. 200GB (yeah, Gigabytes) of space and 2000GB of bandwidth for $6/month is hard to beat. They recently added Ruby on Rails support to their hosting plans, which is nice, but probably not something you're using anyway. Support has been good any time I needed them, including when I spent an hour or so talking to a tech of theirs trying to troubleshoot an FTP connection problem that turned out to be on my end.

For the domain I went through godaddy, but you can use namecheap or even surpass themselves offer some kind of package if i remember right

Kris

Anyone have any experience with GoDaddy's hosting plans?

bash

Fuck GoDaddy in the ear.

As for hosts I have had a very nice run with DreamHost. They offer great service on the cheap and I've been using them for a number of years now.

You might look into getting a Blogger account and use that for hosting. A Blogger Pro account is like $30 a year and even the free account gets you all sorts of goodies. You can point a domain name at your Blogger site so you've got that part covered as well. For hosting your MP3s there's services like File Den (and BitTorrent), Flickr for pictures, and YouTube/Blogger for videos. There's a few upsides to using external services to host your content rather than your own. For starters your content gets indexed and listed in several different databases, images on Flickr for instance might be stumbled upon by anyone looking for band or show photos. You also become immune to the Slashdot/Digg/Reddit effect where you might get huge spikes of data if you gain some sudden popularity which might cripple a vhost site and cause lots of overage charges.

The downside is you con't get very fine grained control of your presentation or actual data. Running your own WordPress setup you can configure it exactly how you want it to behave. The same goes when you host your own media. It might be more of a hassle but at least you're responsible for presentation and maintenance. If you do use free services like the ones listed above always assume they will lose your data so keep your own backups of everything. Do this even if you have your own host. Never rely on someone else's backups to protect your data.

exoplasm

I recently got to setup an account on simplehelix.com and so far like it quite a bit coming from Dreamhost. Dreamhost, while affordable and good and all, is really bad performance-wise compared to some others. 1&1 is by far the worst, though.