What should I be looking for in a website host ?

I have a few website projects and although I am skilled in programming I am not that well educated on web hosts -- what's a good price, key factors in evaluating them.

All 3 sites rely on a large amount of database interaction. Probably similar in many ways to this site.

If you can recommend a good host and informative reasons why, that would be great.

I should note that I intend to use PHP/MySQL , so that needs to be supported.

http://www.JuicyHosting.com/ is inexpensive, with great 24/7 phone support, also lets you host multiple sites. http://www.LocoDomains.com is also very good

Hosting is pretty competitive, so you a lot of them will offer the same stuff for the same price. One of the more reputable companies is http://www.hostforweb.com

Dreamhost ( http://www.dreamhost.com ) and MediaTemple ( http://www.mediatemple.com ) are also popular, but I have heard things about them overselling their products, and ending up not delivering what they are promising.

If you need serious bandwidth, consider VPS or a Dedicated Server.

Look for a host that lets you have shell access. Make sure they provide plenty of storage, and plenty of bandwidth as well. But don't trust any host that claims to offer UNLIMITED storage or bandwidth. They'll cut you off if you use "too much." You also want to make sure they don't have any restrictions about software you can run on their servers. You'll also want to make sure they give you database access, as well.

Good price varies based on how much storage and bandwidth you want.

I use Dreamhost and have been very happy with them. If you're interested in them, follow the link I'm providing and you'll get a bit of a discount- but full disclosure, I get rewarded if you sign up using my referral link =) They're not for everybody, but their prices are more than competitive (especially with the discount!), and they've got very un-restrictive policies.

Hi MaxManni,

Now you can go for cheap web hosts $50year for 10000mb disk space and transfers which seem good for a month or two and then have alot of problems. This is good for a personal type of website but not business sites.

I use http://www.smiths-internet-services.com.au for my web hosting mainly because they are Austrlian based and have fast response times.

They offer MySQL Databases, PHP, Addon Domains, Emails etc etc and I have never had a problem with them so far.

Pricing from an Australian company will be anywhere between $100-$350 for 200-600mb disk space and 1Gb-10Gb of transfers.

If you want to test them ask for a trial account for one month or send an email to them and test the response times.

Hope this helps