Ask HN: With GoDaddy even more horrible, what budget hosting/domain company? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: With GoDaddy even more horrible, what budget hosting/domain company?

5 pointscdcarter10 comments

For example, I'm looking to get a theatrical designer friend of mine set up with a basic static website. He just needs a domain and a few GB of storage on the web with SFTP access. No bells and whistles and none of the complications of setting up a website off S3. I can support him getting it all set up, but I won't be there forever. For something like this I'd (though with some reservations) just get a domain and hosting from a mega-provider like 1and1 or GoDaddy, purely because it's near impossible to find two "budget web hosting review" websites that agree on anything. - Where should I go?

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NearlyFreeSpeech? I haven't used them, but they always come up in discussions like this.

I have, and they've been pretty good so far. Paying for just what you use is nice too.

I like nearlyfreespeech too. A pay-as-you-go service is good for people who don't get much traffic.

Amazon EC2 new pricing for reserved instances might serve your friends' needs:

For a 24/7 instance, a "Heavy Utilization" Micro instance with a 1-year reservation costs $62.00 up front, and then half a cent an hour, which is $3.80 a month, or a total of $105.80 for the year, plus bandwidth.

Set up Varnish so the static site is served from memory and it'll run forever on that.

That said, setting up a web site on S3 isn't hard, but maybe it might be a neat product to provide an FTP interface to S3 for people who are set in their ways.

If you're transferring domains, I'd go with NameCheap. Use coupon code BYEBYEGD for $7.99 transfers. HostGator is pretty standard for basic hosting and good support. They have a discount, 50% off first month using coupon code NOSOPA: http://blog.hostgator.com/2011/12/22/sopa-must-die/

'SOPASucks' gets you $6.99/transfer

Tried that one earlier and it didn't work for me. YMMV

The couple of times domain company thread appeared on HN, name.com was suggested. I moved from GoDaddy there a couple months ago and found their interface far simpler and easier to use.

For a standard cheap shared host with good support, check out Hostgator. I like Namecheap for domains.

dynadot.com is my preference for domain names and they have hosting plans too.

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