OK, you internet-savvy kiddies....

[Robb]

I'm looking to get myself a .com domain name, and looking for the best hosting service out there for a guy on a budget.

Anyone looooove their hosting service?

[bif]

1. hostmysite.com

Fantastic. Unmatched tech help and $8.95 a month the last time I checked. I'm the webmaster of several sites there.

[Nlighten1]

2. I recently switched hosting providers

to www.hostrocket.com. They are pretty good but my previous host www.hostmatters.com was great I just needed more disk space.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. There is two I know of:

One is http://www.dvia.com. It is run by our own bpilgrim. I use them to host http://briansmith2k3.org and bpilgrim's service and responsiveness has been incredible, to say the least. I highly recommend DaVinci Interactive.

The other is http://www.dreamhost.com

[trotsky]

4. And I'll recommend digitalspace.net

$3/month for basic service, which is more than enough for me.

Register your domain name at godaddy.com, nothing cheaper.

[ET Awful]

5. hostrocket.com has worked GREAT for me.

Good prices too.

[rusty charly]

6. i use

register.com

which i think is as cheap as it gets

http://www.register.com/index.html

[uberotto]

7. I use NewbieSite.com

It's $25 a year for the Domain Name (fairly standard price) and the web hosting is free and no banner ads. They also seem to have a pretty good record of uptime.

What I would suggest is that you figure out how much traffic you might be expecting in a month, and how large your Website will be, i.e. if it is going to have a lot of graphics or downloadable material, then figure out how much bandwidth you will need and use that to determine which hosting company to use. I think that the average for low cost web hosting companies is around 500MB. I have seen some as high as 2GB, but these tend to start getting to the high end of "low cost".

After figuring out your required bandwidth, then you can start looking at what features you will want. How much storage space will you need, do you need a database, do you need more than one email address, do you want to be able to host more than one website. This is where the various low cost web hosts start to differentiate themselves.


From the Website:

With Every Domain Registration you get...
25MB space
Your own domain name
500 MB per month bandwidth
Web based email
Web based file manger
10 emails (eg: [e-mail])
sub domains ( eg: work.yourdomain.com)
You can upgrade the hosting package as your site grow
Your own FTP access
Detailed site statistics
PHP and Frontpage support
Unlimited customer support
No banner Ads
Your own control panel using Cpanel 5.0 and

[salmonhorse]

8. Bravenet ~

http://www.bravenet.com

[hunter]

9. It depends what you want to do with the site...

I use different hosts for different websites. The kind of ISP that is wonderful for a small personal site may not be appropriate for a "business critical" site, and vice versa.

One thing to think carefully about is the contact information associated with your domain name. If you intend to post something controversial, the kind of stuff that results in mail and phone calls from angry people telling you exactly how and why you are going to hell, then you probably don't want to upset your wife and kids by making your home adress available to anyone who knows how to do a "whois" search... unless maybe you enjoy showing off your big guns and big dogs...

Do you have a P.O. Box and second phone line? If not, consider something like godaddy.com's "Domains By Proxy" service.

Also, if you happen to obtain a domain name that you are truly attached too, make certain you will be able to maintain control of it if your business relationship with your host or the domain name registrar goes sour. For my own peace of mind I always register important names using a home address or a bona-fide United States Post Office Box. (I had one very unpleasant experience where the inadvertently expired domain name of a church group was picked up by a porn site... you can imagine what trouble that caused.)