Ask HN: What web hosting do you use?

I started off with HostGator's shared service. I started going over their limits years ago (mostly CPU, IO, memory, and execution time). The execution time was a real kicker for me - they have reapers that go around looking for processes that have been running for more than 120 seconds, and kill them. So if you have a large MySQL database that you're trying to back up, good luck... At any rate, I'm not saying their policy was unreasonable - it was just a dealbreaker for me.

At that point, I looked around for another host. I was impressed with MediaTemple's managed VPS offerings, as they had 3 levels of 'scaling' (for $50/100/150). Over the past 8 months, I've had major IO issues. Oddly, my IO issues have little correlation with my traffic patterns, so I suspect that I'm on a heavily loaded server - though they state that they see nothing but normal disk/CPU/etc utilization. That may be true, but I'm moving on.

In the end, I decided that Linode offers a level of granularity that was not matched by MediaTemple. At Linode, they expect that you may well want to separate your production server from your MySQL server from your dev server, and their backend is built with multi-server management in mind. I've set up separate MySQL and PHP servers so far, and things have been going very well. This will allow me to scale each in proportion to its needs, instead of having to scale a monolithic server instance.

For just a blog, do you want to mess around with the shell? If so, Linode or similar (SliceHost?) might be good for you. They start off small ($20/month for the cheapest), and they allow you to upgrade in small chunks.

If you don't want to deal with shell, I find HostGator to be quite reasonable, and they are extremely cheap. I still host a bunch of personal sites with them.

I have around 1 year with Lace Host (lacehost.com), the website/user interface are crappy but it doesn't matter since you have Cpanel and FTP.

They are cheap (around $22 for 1.5 GB hosting / year). You have got unlimited Mysql DataBases, Very large bandwidth and an always (almost) online customer service (it's the owner, he'll reply to your questions even if it's not hosting related).

Overall experience: Positive. I'm running 4 websites (on 4 domains). 3 blogs, 1 personal website and a bunch of auto-scripts that runs via Cron Jobs. I get around 250 hits daily.

+ I got around 1,100 hit from Stumble Upon (i got a fav from a popular member) and the host seemed to be fine with that traffic.

Currently, I'm keeping with them, for scaling, the admin told me that they can move me from shared to private server in no down time.

My advice will be: Go for it! You can also Google for reviews about it.

I've had great success and ease-of-use with Bluehost (bluehost.com) and its subsidiary Hostmonster (hostmonster.com). They are an affordable shared host that do all the domain stuff as well. Their support is great and they have the latest version of CPanel. If you wanted to make LAMP or Rails applications they have support for that as well. Overall with domain, connersc.com was $120 for two years.

Sometimes when the shared server is getting pounded, remote-ssh development can be a little laggy but if you are running Wordpress (which is in CPanel as a turnkey installation), you should be fine.

There are probably other hosts out there, but as far as service and price its been working for me so far. I even put clients on it (before moving the others to rackspace).

I use HostGator... I've noticed several other commenters have said they left Hostgator when they needed root access, or more resources. I had the same issues, but instead of leaving I switched to their VPS service.

The service has always been great, I didn't have any problem installing Passenger and the VPS is still going strong!

I like WebFaction a lot. It's shared hosting and you don't get root access, but their servers are set up such that you can basically install anything you want. They are also a UK company.

I used HostGator until I wanted root access, then switched to Linode. Both are excellent.

Mediatemple is great.