Web Hosting

[rlse9]

I'm looking for a decent, relatively cheap web hosting service. I've done quite a bit of research and haven't found much. The hosts themselves greatly oversell themselves and searching for reviews brings up 95% sites that have "reviews" that are aimed at nothing but getting a click through to the host so they can get their referral money. And any forums related to web hosting are filled with people just trying to promote their own service, making it hard to distinguish between legit positive reviews and fake crap. Very, very frustrating.

So, does anyone here have any suggestions? I'm looking at making a site using Wordpress, I made an account on a free hosting site to play around with it a bit and I like it. The site will have a fair amount of pictures and maybe a weekly podcast, but nothing that needs a ton of bandwidth. Reliability is more important to me, I don't care if they say they offer 5 TB of bandwidth if they're down hours as a time. I'd also like a host that offers monthly hosting, not the advertising a monthly price until you get to the checkout and realize that you have to pay for an entire year up front.

I was looking at Squarespace originally because the website creation tools are good and it's easy to use and reliable. But the fact that they require using their higher tier accounts to get things that should be offered in the basic accounts (like custom URLs and being able to change backgrounds between pages) pushed me away from them.

Thanks.

 

[Chambered]

I've had Dreamhost for about a year and never had any problems. Several of my friends have had them for the past few years and never expressed any dissatisfaction, either.

They have Wordpress and many other features set up as a "one click install." You just set up the settings and it installs for you and it's all very easy to configure.

Unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Runs on a Linux server
Features:
http://dreamhost.com/hosting.html

Cost is $10.95/month for the monthly plan ($49.95 setup fee if you choose the monthly option, so that's the biggest downside).
Otherwise, it's $120/year.

Aaaand...of course I'll have to ask you to use my referral if you do like them
I can set up a referral to give you a discount off the price of the hosting/setup. The referral for the monthly plan allows me to give up to $50 off, so we could split that, you take $25 off the price (about $60 after setup for the monthly plan) and the other $25 comes back to me for the referral.

Otherwise, the yearly plan allows for $97 off, which we could split the same way.

The only other host I've had experience with is GoDaddy.
Their monthly plan runs $7/mo.
150 GBSpace, 1,500 GB Transfer
http://www.godaddy.com/Hosting/Legacy.aspx?ci=8971

I went with them originally because they were fairly well known and I wasn't really sure where else to go. Once it came time to renew my account, several of my friends had been recommending DreamHost, and one night they happened to have a 24 hour deal, so I jumped over to them.
GoDaddy's not bad, either. Their site and interface is a little harder to navigate (and more crowded), I think, but you get to choose between Windows and Linux servers (if you know the difference, then it might matter to you, if you don't, then it probably won't). And they also have similar "one click install" stuff for things like Wordpress.

Dreamhost has one "plan" and a few payment options (Monthly/Yearly/BiYearly). GoDaddy has a much wider range of plans, and a payment option to meet each of them.

Of course, I'd prefer you to use my referral . Just let me know if you're interested. For your purposes, you'd get by just fine with GoDaddy, for sure. Doubt you need even 150GB of space.