Hosting

Over the years I have had to find hosting and move hosts numerous times and I was looking for a host for a new site recently and was frustrated at the lack of any directory or listing with reviews and what-not (for UK hosts specifically). If I ever get time, I’ll try and put something like together, until then, I decided to build a page with recommendations to some of the services I’ve found good and some I’ve heard are good. Details change and I’m not making any guarantees so don’t blame me if anything goes wrong.

Dreamhost

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Dreamhost has been around since 1997 and is owned by it’s employees. They aim to provide top notch hosting at great prices but with an eye to customer service. Although I’ve never used them, they have garnered a great reputation and have been recommended a number of times for WP hosting, but their vast range of features also includes one-click installation of a number of common packages, from e-commerce apps to wikis, Ruby on Rails support, shell access and a subversion repository, amongst other things.

WebAttention

Linux shared and reseller hosting. Shared hosting starts at £30 a year, reseller accounts start at £130 a year. I’ve got a reseller account with these guys and reliability has been very good, support excellent and a nice price too.

Meir Hosting

Linux shared and reseller hosting. Shared hosting starts and an unbelievable £11.99 a year, reseller accounts start at £71.50 a year. Don’t let the, frankly, awful new site design (July 2005) fool you, I got a small account for a friend of mine with these guys and they’ve been reliable and they do like to keep you informed of all that’s happening, which I like.

TextDrive

Linux shared hosting. Accounts start at $132 a year. I’ve got a lifetime account with these guys (they do deals every now and again) and they’ve been very reliable, they also support some features few, if any, other hosts support. I would say that, until their custom-built control panel turns up, it’s not best for beginners, webmin is confusing as hell, but it does the job if you know how. Yes, these are US-based, but who cares.

Clook.Net

Linux shared and reseller hosting. Reseller accounts start at £29.99 a year, reseller accounts start at £119.99 a year. I’ve not hosted with these guys (come close though) but I’ve never heard anything but rave reviews for them.

Open Mind Hosting

Windows shared and reseller hosting. Shared accounts start at £30 (£50 with Coldfusion) a year, reseller accounts start at £20 a month (£30 with Coldfusion). I don’t really want Windows hosting as I use some Apache-only functions, but I’ve heard rave reviews and I know the guy who owns and runs it, highly recommended if you need Windows or Coldfusion.

Purple Paw

Linux shared and reseller hosting. Shared hosting starts at £25 per year, reseller hosting starts at £27.99 a month. I hosted with these guys for a number of years and they had excellent reliability, I found their accounts have been getting a little pricey for their stats with other services offering more bang for your buck. Fantastic support though, they went well beyond the call of duty helping me wrangle a domain name away from another host.

SiteHQ

Linux and Windows shared and reseller hosting. Shared hosting starts at £25/£30 (Linux/Windows) per year, reseller hosting starts at £15/£18 per month. I hosted with these guys for years and they were very reliable with good support response time (on the rare occasions I needed them). I left because I didn’t get on with their support people (I hate it when support people don’t sign their name and use a generic ‘IT Support’ sign off) or one of the people who ran it. YMMV.