Web hosting?

[Mike Fishcake]

I need a reliable web host for my stepdad's company. Currently it's hosted with easily, but I need to get some POP accounts set up. I can get it for £10 extra, but it comes with a paltry 240MB transfer allowance. Per YEAR. It costs loads to add email transfer allowance (quite why it's so expensive compared to web bandwidth I don't know)

What I need:

- FTP access
- Definitely no more than 100MB space (probably no more than 50MB TBH)
- Bandwidth is currently about 500MB a month, but I'd like a bit more than that with the option to increase it.
- 5 POP email accounts and maybe a couple of redirects as well.
- PHP
- mySQL (this will be the killer, i know)

I have a few domains registered with 123-reg.co.uk that seem to be ok. Any idea if they're reliable for hosting?

I've obviously had a look around at various companies, but i'd like to know if anyone has any personal recommendations.

Cheers.

[IBM]

Brinkster is pretty good, although you'll need to check the details to see what it's got everything you want...

http://www.brinkster.com/Hosting/Professional.aspx

That works out at $7.95 (£4ish)/month when you pay two years in advance (which is just silly), but it's $11.95 (£7.50ish)/month for just three months. Has more than your required storage/bandwidth/mail accounts as well as PHP & a 100Mb mySQL db....they're reliable and customer support is pretty good...

[DavidM]

I've used both www.3dpixelnet.com & www.34sp.com before now with no complaints.

[mike_w]

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=2354

I like 3dpixelnet - it gives you PHP and MySQL on all their accounts - http://www.3dpixelnet.com/products.php

Mike

[Mike Fishcake]

Cheers for the recommendations - i've had a word with a guy at 3dpixelnet and they do seem to know their stuff.

[directhex]

i use gradwell.net - costly at £11.75 a month, but on that i get ssh, php, sql, imap, pop3, and pretty much total control over any of those

[Richard Loxley]

I don't know how much technical detail you want to get into, but if you want the power of a hosted linux account, I really recommend bytemark.co.uk

They host 25 "virtual" linux boxes per server, so you effectively get a linux server of your own, with 3GB disk space, 15GB/month data transfer, and you can install and run whatever you like. I pay £176/year.

My friend recommended them to me - he's been with them for a year - I've been with them for a month, and my websites are so much faster than with my old hosting.

It's not for everyone - you have to be prepared to muck around with linux, setting up DNS, mail server and apache, but there are tutorials for all that.

Take a look and see what you think.

If you want to sign up, mention my username "rloxley" and I'll get a 10% discount on my next renewal. But I really do think they're great - I'm not just mentioning them for the referral discount :-)

[nick_1]

If you are after something a little bigger I've started using the german based stratos who offer dedicated servers for prices between €29 and €99. The bandwidth limits are very generous (500 GB -> unlimited) and ideal for gaming servers or larger sites. So far they have been good hosts but I've been having to learn german as their admin control panel is in german (although the server software is all english).

I hope thats useful to someone.

Nick