http://bsdwebhosting.net/

No monthly fee. You read that correctly. Rather, they charge you $2/gig for bandwidth, and $1.50/month/100Mb, and basically nothing else.

No web based config but excellent technical support. Paypal only.

This is kind of off topic, but you know who absoluletly sucks it? NTT/Verio... They fouled up my domain transfer at least 4 times in a _row_ because they couldn't figure out their own DNS setup. Grr.... =)

Ditto on dreamhost. Good customer service, great features for the price. They're not the cheapest, but they're competitive, and they've got *excellent* service.

I'm loving Dreamhost. It starts at $9.95 a month, but for what you get SSH, Samba, MySQL... It is worth it. The stability is worth it as well.

I know a ton of people who use DH and have heard no complaints.

Another vote for http://www.icdsoft.com - they're only 5 bucks a month, and they do everything I want them to, have neat web interfaces, allow you to run fun stuff like phpBB and MovableType, give you 100mb space/5gb d/l a month, and are based in a big shiny building in Hong Kong, which is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

I would reccomend http://logjamming.com. They're GREAT!!

Edited by author 06-10-2003 06:36 PM
I've had http://mikelietz.org hosted by http://www.digitalspace.net for a number of years and I've been very happy. For a mere three bucks a month (two when I started) I get all the webspace I need (10 MB), shell access and a rudimentary web interface (there's a demo at the digitalspace site) for administration, perl and mysql for my coder's aspirations, free webmail (with no space quota at all), and a couple other features that I can't come up with. My biggest complaint is that the server logs do not save HTTP-REFERERs and as such I do not know what lurid Google searches lead to my pages. Otherwise I am happy, running hand-coded HTML and perl as well as a fully functional movabletype installation.

EDIT: Now I remember. Customer service is very existent, though I have had little experience with them. They've got live chat and phone help many hours of the day, but not all, so don't run your pacemaker-pinger on their stuff. At least, not for the cheapest package. And also I know that PHP works since the webmail system is horde (http://www.horde.org/).

Draw a ven diagram -- three circles partially overlapping each other in the middle of the page. One is "fast/reliable." One is "generous bandwidth." One is "cheap." For the most part, with webhosts you have to pick two.

I use Timberland hosting. $6 a month chock full of goodies. Tech support is e-mail only, but they are FAST. I've had responses in 30 minutes or less for normal questions, 15 minutes or less for emergencies.

http://www.timberlandhosting.com

I researched affordable hosting high and low last year for a friend's blog I was setting up. We ended up with Hosting Matters and have been happy. But others in the running were InsiderHosting ( http://insiderhosting.com/ ), Corner Host ( http://cornerhost.com/ )and Pair. I would would ping their servers to find out where they are located, which will affect how quickly your site loads, etc. Also, do they own their own network operations center. Or are they just leasing a server in someone else's building. And, read the message boards, especially the announcements section where they post server downtime messages. I almost went with Corner Host, which is basically a one-man show, but supposedly very responsive to customers. Pair is on the other end of the spectrum, a huge hosting company, exceptional, rock-solid reliability, but a little more expensive. And they're service techs can be kinda curt. They don't have time for hand-holding. Hope that helps.

Ryan mentioned powweb.

powweb limits your total IMAP storage to 15MB.

Also, I was with powweb (a brief dalliance from pair) when they did a data center upgrade/move. Almost no warning, screwed their own DNS, and resulted in over three days of downtime with very little communication from their customer service folks. Where I work, people would have lost their jobs over that fiasco. So powweb lost my biz.

Went right back to pair.

I second the motion for vervehosting. I've been using them for about 18 months now and have had only one outage. The online control panel is great and their customer service is super fast. If you're doing any Cold Fusion or Online Sales type stuff, I've found that hostmysite.com is also excellent in a lot of the same ways as verve, but is a bit more expensive...

would highly recommend http://dreamhost.com

I've been with pair.com for 3 years now, never a single problem. Excellent, responsive customer service both in technical and accounts. Was with them while they moved their entire data center, and only have 30 minutes of scheduled (and very well advertised in advance) downtime.

All their hosting is FreeBSD - their current reference system is 4.6.

They're a bit more conservative than other services - emphasizing reliability over having the latest bells, whistles, release, or other hot item. Moveable Type and Gallery were easy installations, didn't require a bunch of extra work on my part (ie, almost all the needed items were pre-installed). All your stuff - webfiles and email spools - draws from the same quota (unlike another service I was with that put a 15MB cap on your total IMAP mailboxes). IMAP, POP, and they even provide an SMTP relay that works on the road (POP/IMAP before send). Webmail (Squirrelmail) for all accounts. Great web config interface.

Verve Hosting. Verve Hosting. Verve Hosting.
http://www.vervehosting.com
I did a ton of research on this about two months ago and landed on them. They're cheap and the customer service is excellent. Plus, they give you a web-based control panel to manage everything with that's VERY robust.

powweb.com

cheap, reliable and not a major pain in the rear to deal with.