Dream Host

Dream Host is a truly excellent web hosting provider, a dream. They really do care about what they do and are not trying to milk customers for every little thing like all the others. Their prices are great.

They offer unlimited numbers of domains / sites hosted at the same account. This is unbeatable. They do not charge extra for domain add-ons or for subdomains.

As an actual ICANN domain name registrar, you can easily register names through them at any time and host them. And though tradition has registrars telling everyone it takes a few days to propogate DNS information, with Dream Host your new site is visible within the hour usually. I know this because I wrote this and started service while in Japan, and Dream Host is physically on the other side of the planet!

They also offer all the advanced features you could want and should want:

• shell access
• ssh
• sftp
• unlimited mysql databases
• server side scripting
• Perl
• Ruby on Rails
• PHP 4 or 5 (changeable with one click for each domain!)
• Joomla!
• shopping cart stuff, etc...

They do not have a super cheap plan targeting beginners. Plans start super reasonably at about $10 USD a month, but the hosts that have cheaper plans don't offer nearly as much disk space or bandwidth and usually charge you for every little thing, even though most things are automated by scripts anyway.

Their help pages are in the form of a Wiki. Unfortunately the help pages are not really written for newbies and beginners. So if you are new to using a web host yourself, you may want to look at all the options and spend a few days learning about what services are and what terms mean and learn about things like unix/linux and ftp. It's not a lot, and not hard. If you can write your own HTML and CSS then you can handle this stuff. If you feel comfortable using unix/linux/os x type command line tools, then this service will be a joy to you.

To prove how cool they are, they add to your disk space and bandwidth for every week just for staying with their service. And the addition is not a petty amount and it is not temporary.

Best of all, they don't host your site on Microsoft products. They use real UNIX. Safe, secure, reliable.

The Dream Host home page is ugly. (too many animated gifs) But don't let that fool you. If you want good hosting, this is it. If you don't want control and don't want to know or learn how to use this stuff yourself, that is, if you want idiot-proof, brainless hosting, use something more limited and expensive like Yahoo's web hosting plans. They'll hold your hand, but you'll pay a lot for it.