We're on a shoestring budget... looking to keep hosting fees well below $100 per month.
Hoping the community here can share its recommendations and experiences.
Many thanks, Lance Jones
Because of that, I'm pretty picky about where I host.
I currently have my sites at ServInt on 2 VPSes (a Signature VPS for my production sites and an Essential VPS for testing my new startup company.)
The primary VPS serves about 2,000 pageviews per day with no complaints.
My advice, having been in the industry for many years:
1) NEVER use shared hosting for a startup company. I would always budget and start with a VPS...even a small one. Shared hosting is likely to fall over at random times and it often fails at the worst times--when you launch a product and get a ton of visitors, for instance.
Shared hosting is fine for things like small company blogs, etc. But not for a scalable business.
2) Go managed, unless you want to wear a sysadmin hat as well as a developer hat (hint: you probably don't.) I recommend letting the hosting company do updates while you focus on writing code and testing.
3) DON'T cheap out! Hosting is not a place to save money. $50/month for a managed VPS is completely reasonable and is well worth the extra $40 over shared hosting if you need to scale. You do not want to have to move your hosting when you're in the middle of a really good run with clients.
I picked ServInt because they have been in business since 1995 and they host some pretty large sites. Their reviews are overwhelmingly good and their prices are reasonable. Their support responds quickly. I recently put in a ticket asking for server monitoring to be installed. I know this would have taken 1 hour+ of my time (and I used to admin servers for a living!) They not only responded to the ticket within a few minutes, but had monitoring installed quickly.
I cannot stress enough that it is worth the extra money to go with a higher-end hosting solution. Yes, inevitably there will be "But shared hosting works for me!" replies. It works...until it doesn't. You get an Alexa top 10,000 site, and even with good caching, your site doesn't work so well with shared hosting--then you have to scramble around and muck with switching providers when you should be working with your new customers and working on your product. That's why I don't even recommend starting with shared.
Obviously, that's unacceptable for most businesses, but if you think your business won't get sunk by that type of outage ... then I'd say Dreamhost might work well for you. For me, it's handled occasional heavy bursts of traffic without crashing, and I bet its resources are enough to handle most startups' demands. Once you hit the point at which it can't keep up with your demands, you should probably be able to afford something better -- assuming you have a viable business model.
- VPS; a few good men are Linode, Slicehost, ServInt.
- Dedicated Server.
- Cloud Computing with Amazon Cloud or Rackspace.
One of my consideration is not to overpay what I dun need. First I look at the bandwidth I am using currently utilizing, do a rough estimate how much it will cost on Amazon Cloud/Rackspace/VPS. Also consider yr long terms options, do you want to go dedicated or in the cloud later on. Cause it can be quite challenging to move the DB and files around later on.
I've been using Hostgator for ~2 years and I can only imagine leaving if I plan to run my own servers.
No idea how it scales with the "unlimited" bandwidth/disk space but it's more than enough for me now.
This is a genuine response btw - I'm not gonna give you a referral code :)