I’d like to share the results of my research into low-cost webhosting. Don’t worry, none of these links are affiliate/referral links; I have nothing to gain from recommending these hosts.
The cheapest webhosting solutions generally come in the form of managed shared hosting services, where you are given a limited access account on a server shared by tens or hundreds of other clients like you. I recommend two shared webhosts, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN) and MediaLayer, and one VPS host, Slicehost. This blog is currently hosted by NFSN.
NFSN’s most distinctive feature is its utility computing or pay-per-usage model. Instead of a flat monthly fee, they charge you for the precise amount of bandwidth and diskspace you use, no more, no less. You pre-pay any amount you want, and money is taken out of your account as your website consumes resources. When your account runs out of funds, your website shuts down (you can create alerts to notify yourself when funds run low). This blog, which only gets 50-100 daily visitors so far, is still running on the $1 payment I made a few weeks ago. For smaller sites, NFSN is cheaper than the most oversold shared hosts on the planet.
NFSN has another distinctive feature (that for some reason it does not advertise much): clustered and redundant backend systems. NFSN employs load-adaptive clustering systems that allow it to handle traffic surges like Digg/Slashdot effects by moving or mirroring your site onto other servers. Squid proxy servers are deployed for load balancing and content caching. To quote an NFSN employee: “You might find a shared hosting provider with more redundancy and fault tolerance built into their network than we have, but I seriously doubt it.”
Here’s a nice review of NFSN. And you can always try them out yourself, for free! Signing up gives you $0.10 credit (not sure about the amount, I think it was $0.10) which is plenty for you to setup your site and play around with the features on NFSN. No strings attached, no payment information needed.
MediaLayer claims to be the best of the best when it comes to shared application hosting. They are not interesting in just serving static content; they pride themselves in giving your dynamic web applications the best performance possible. To provide optimal performance, MediaLayer deploys the LiteSpeed web server (a proprietary web server compatible with Apache but significantly more efficient), and uses Zend Optimizer (which optimizes PHP code on the fly) and eAccelerator (which caches PHP opcode to avoid unnecessary recompilation), very unusual for shared hosts. They also guarantee 100% of your promised resources because they do not oversell. I don’t have personal experience with MediaLayer, but from their features and stellar reputation, I’d love to give them a try.
There is another type of webhosting solution that is often neglected when it comes to low-cost hosting: Virtual Private Servers (VPS). With a VPS, you get a virtual environment that operates as if you have a dedicated server, but in fact you are in control of a virtual portion of an actual server. VPS packages are generally more expensive and perform much much better than shared hosting packages because you get a much larger portion of a server’s resources, and you have full control over your own VPS, with root access and even the ability to install your own operating system (not always).
If your budget can afford $20/month in hosting fees, look no further than Slicehost’s VPS service. On Slicehost, your site will perform like a large commercial site hosted on state-of-the-art dedicated servers. With Slicehost, you can get the kind of service that used to cost hundreds and thousands of dollars a month. The catch is that you must know how to setup, configure, and administer your web server. Managing a VPS is a lot easier and risk-free compared to managing a dedicated server, especially with user-friendly tools provided by Slicehost, but it is definitely not for novices who don’t want to get their hands dirty. Another catch is that because Slicehost purchases new hardware strictly based on the number of new customers, and because of Slicehost’s wild success, there is currently a waitlist for new customers. It is well worth the wait though.
Other quality hosts I’m less confident about: A Small Orange, VPSLink.
Finally, I leave you with a warning: steer clear of incredibly oversold webhosts promising impossible amounts of resources for low prices. The usual suspects include Dreamhost, HostGator, Site5 and many others.
Many of these hosts have tried to convince everyone that the impossible 500GB diskspace + 5 TB bandwidth plans for $6 are not too good to be true. Some say it’s all marketing, competing over ignorant consumers. Some say that their 600,000-strong customer base allows them to get incredible discounts that can be passed along to clients. Others say that 99% of their customers underutilize their resources but pledge to continue servicing the select few customers who do use all 500GB of diskspace or 900GB of bandwidth. HostGator even promises to move any client who crashes his shared server to a semi-dedicated server. (Sources: 1, 2, 3)
Unfortunately, an hour spent Googling reveals that all these promises are worth shit. Maybe they really will move your site if you crash your server and bitch to the CEO and threaten to sue. But what if you just slow your server to a crawl but don’t crash it? What if you can’t get through to the CEO? Don’t have the money or guts to threaten legal action? The bottomline is that in 99% of the cases, you will run afoul of some “reasonable” CPU or memory usage restriction clause long before you can use even a tiny fraction of the 900GB promised you; you will be promptly shown the door.
Don’t count on good and knowledgeable tech support since these hosts easily have tens of thousands of customers, so unless they hire every expert sysadmin on the planet several times over, the person you end up dealing with is likely to be an entry-level tech support dude reading from a script.
These cheap oversold hosts also ensnare new customers into signing long-term contracts with them right off the bat. Wow, 500GB diskspace for $6? Sorry, only if you pre-pay for 10 years. You want to pay monthly? No problem! $11/month please + $50 signup fee. Are you kidding me?!
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