Hosting

When people ask me “Where should I host my website?” I give them two recommendations: Dreamhost and Slicehost.

I’ve been using Dreamhost to host about 10 sites for the past year, including this one. I have no complaints and many kudos. If you want dead-simple administration of your sites plus ssh and FTP access, they’re really good. They have one-click installs for Wordpress, Joomla, MediaWiki, ZenCart, Pligg, Gallery, phpBB, and a bunch of other popular open source tools. Unlimited e-mail accounts for all of your domains, unlimited MySQL databases, the ability to create your own DNS entries, and more. If you sign up, use promo code EARL3 and they’ll give you $25 off your fees.

If you want root access on a Linux box, your computing needs are greater than simple hosting (multiple servers, dedicated IP addresses, private LAN IPs, etc.), and you know how to get everything going from a bare bones Linux install via ssh, try Slicehost. Their setup is excellent and you get exactly what you need. If you want a small one-person mail server or a remote Nagios monitoring system it’s yours for $20/month. They support current versions of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, CentOS and Gentoo. I’ve used them for a couple of projects over the past year and I’ve had no problems at all. If you go this route, I highly recommend learning/using Puppet for configuration management since you can rebuild your servers at will or add more capacity in minutes.