Web hosting recommendations?

[Ste Pickford]

(I've been lurking for about a year, and I registered today in order to post, and find that I'm forced to remain a lurker for another week before I can post anywhere but here. grrrr!)

We're working on an indie game, and we're about at the stage where we need to get our website at least functioning in preparation for launch, so I need to pick a hosting company.

Can anyone recommend a hosting company that they are happy with? Its hard to tell how good anyone is from their website.

As well as a good price and reliability, our key requirements are PHP, multiple MySQL databases, at least 1 static IP, a fair amount of disk space and a decent amount of monthly bandwidth, and particularly a good idea of what happens if we exceed the monthly bandwidth (hey, we might have a hit game!) - Will the website just go offline? Will we get hit with stupidly high charges? Or can we just pay proportionally more / upgrade our package if we go over our limit?

I remember lizardsoft.com getting a recommendation on here a few months ago. Any good?

And I'm looking at ixwebhosting.com (just becuase they were top of thewebhostingchart.com), but its all a bit bewildering.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[Robert Cummings]

Hi Ste,

I remember reading that most of those charts were owned/fixed in some way.

I use hostinginsiders.com myself, it has some pretty good features and bags of bandwidth on a budget. Payable by paypal though. It hasn't let me down so far. I chose to ask him for a subdomain rather than have the free .com offer because I want to keep my dot com.

And for domain registration, if anyone's reading, you can't really beat www.123-reg.co.uk (they also do very reliable hosting but also quite expensive).

Finally, the most reliable hosting I've had in the UK is www.easily.co.uk , but they also turned out the most expensive I've tried.

Swings and roundabouts.

[Gnatinator]

There have been many threads on hosting suggestions. Try the search to get a bunch of recent info and reccomendations.

[digriz]

Checkout macoman.co.uk...really.

They're cheap and very reliable. They don't support asp though.

[soniCron]

I use LunarPages ( http://www.lunarpages.com ), and couldn't recommend a better host. You get some 4GB storage, 80GB transfer, 15 subdomains, unlimited email/forward/etc, EXCELLENT UPTIME (I've NEVER known them in the past year to go down), VERY VERY FAST (2,000Mbit connection), PHP, MySQL, anonymous FTP access... for $22/mo. They've got another plan, basically with less bandwidth, for $7/mo.

If you exceed you bandwidth, it's $3.95/GB, however, they will not charge you beforehand. You MUST buy it in advance (and the chances of you running out of bandwidth before checking your stats is very slim). However, if you DO forsee outrunning 80GB/mo, then you'll either need to look into managed hosting (which is quite expensive), or a download host, such as FileBurst ( http://www.fileburst.com ), which has $1/GB transfer, specifically designed for file downloads (*VERY* fast).

If you went with FileBurst, you'd mix and match the two services. LunarPages for your website, FileBurst for file downloads. I believe it's $5/mo (minimum) + bandwidth. That is to say, you only pay for the bandwidth, but a minimum of at least $5. VERY easy to set up, and highly recommended if your demo is > 10MB.

[Mike Boeh]

The lurk is there for a reason- to discourage posts exactly like this that have been covered a zillion times. Use search, search is your friend.

Any more inappropriate posts in the "News, Announcements, and Feedback" to get around the 1-week lurk will be immediately deleted, without exception.

[Jack Norton]

I agree. This topic was discussed really a lot of times...!

[JPGinLA]

So, please delete or lock this (and others with similar familiarity!).

-JPG