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March 15, 2006

Want to get your own website hosted?

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UPDATE: Via a tip from Pooja P, I was able to find links to 4 very good web hosting providers:


I suggest just selecting the one from the above which offers the most space for the least price, with no contract.
The original post follows.

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A recent mail I sent about this:

Hi XYZ/PQR,

You were asking me for tips on finding a web host to host your website.

I use http://hostdime.com. I pay $4 per month to hostdime for the hosting. I did this after shopping around abt a couple of years ago. Nowadays the costs have gone down even for some of the bigger companies, and space has become cheaper etc, so the market has changed. You should do your own study. A good price is upto $5 per month, or if you go for a brand name then upto $10 per month.

I will tell you what I have found out:

Hostdime has these good features:


  • very good customer support, they answer a phone call 24X7, within a couple of seconds. Literally. They answer faster than I answer my own phone..! (which can also mean they have less customers ;-) )
  • they have many features at a low price. They didnt arrange their plans well, they offer almost the same features in their cheapest and their most expensive plans. Hence, we who look for cheap bargains, get good features at a lower price.
  • they are cheap
  • they have "cpanel" configuration interface, which is quite powerful
  • some of the good features which I like in their plan are: perl, php, cgi-bin, ssi, real time streaming, unlimited email, unlimited subdomains, unlimited mysql databases, 6 web statistics programs, fantastico program installer, preinstalled cgi scripts, , etc.
  • they take regular backups

Their downside:


  • their uptime is not very high, I have sometimes observed my website being down. Hence I am a little apprehensive about giving out a xyz@gaurang.org email address, since I am afraid it may not be delivered if the site is down.
  • they have a one-time $20 fees to allow you to SSH in (not a big minus)
  • the server is slow when I run commands on it during an ssh session. For web browsing though, the site is okay in speed.

To start evaluating web hosting providers, check out the plans of the following companies:

To evaluate anyone make sure they support: perl, php, mysql, provide SSH access (atleast on request), web stats, and take backups. Ask them how much uptime can you expect from them. Ask them what configuration panel do they use, and what features does it have - a software called "cpanel" would be preferable, though not required. A unixy os (preferably Linux) should be mandatory.

You can get the domain name genearlly for a very cheap price from your hosting provider. So no need to buy it separately.


Taking a cursory look at yahoo and godaddy, I see goddady has a plan for $4 per month. That one looks good. Just make sure they support perl, and ssh access. Also ask them whether they have a powerful configuration panel. If not, then you can try out hostdime.

Abt having a blog on your website: since you will have your own host, you can select http:///movabletype.org or http://wordpress.org . You can download the software and install it. If you dont want that hassle, then http://blogger.com would be good enough, though it is much less powerful than movabletype and wordpress. Nowadays, http://360.yahoo.com/ is also a good choice for blogging if you dont mind the yahoo name. Update: Also check out http://wordpress.com and http://typepad.com

Hope this helps!

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