Web hosters?

I'm thinking of pulling my personal stuff off of the university's servers and having it hosted somewhere. I'd need PHP and MySQL as well as someone who could register a domain and provide some DNS services for it. Any ideas? Who to avoid? Other info?

I'm thinking of pulling my personal stuff off of the university's servers and having it hosted somewhere. I'd need PHP and MySQL as well as someone who could register a domain and provide some DNS services for it. Any ideas? Who to avoid? Other info?

I've worked with ProNetHosting, ImHosted and see a lot of stuff going up on GoDaddy but I prefer to use Somerset Solutions (haha, because I own it!). The truth of the business is that all plans boil down to how much space you'll need for files and how much bandwidth you'll use in a given month. I've seen plans as low as $1.50 and as high as $40(NYC pricing) per month for single site accounts. Many of the low dollar plans have implied 1 year agreements which come with early termination charges; some of the higher end ones offer more bandwidth than an individual acct. will ever need. A $20 plan, to me, is a commercial e-comerce rate so look for one well under than.

Most hosting today is done under Linux with PHP and MySQL as standard feature. Many, myself included, offer free add-ons: CMS systems like Joomla, Mambo, Nuke-PHP plus blogs (WordPress is popular), discussion boards (phpBB) and so on.

All providers can set up DNS and a domain name costs only $15 a year to keep.

If you see anything that you're interested in drop me a line, I'd be glad to look it over for you.

Regards,
The Count

I manage all my domain registrations through Godaddy.com. Cheap, effective, and honest (just choose "expert" or "fast" checkout so they don't bug you with their overpriced crap hosting.)

You can do DNS through them...their control panel thinger is nice and easy to use and their DNS changes propagate quick.

For hosting, I have two recommendations:

For simple shared hosting with email and website services, the kind you can get a million different places, I use Hostgator. That's where I have all my MoofIT services located, including my personal email. I have the Baby package, $10 for 100 gigs disk space and 1TB bandwidth/mo, free addon and subdomains, unlimited email accounts, unlimited FTP accounts, and a full array of services including unlimited MySQL DBs (limited only by disk space), PHP, Perl, everything -but- ASP, anon FTP, and console access. The works. For $10. And they have been FANTASTIC when I needed to contact support, even though I'm a small fry. Very on the ball.

Hostgator also offers domain registration, and I trust them enough that I would use it, but I never have.

For a do it yourself option, check ServINT internet services. They offer virtualized Linux environments. It essentially behaves just like your own colocated box. Those plans start at $50, but I recommend their $80 package. We use them at work for DNS and SMTP failover.

Also popular for standard shared hosting:
Dreamhost (favored by small and medium webcomics and blogs)
Speakeasy (favored by large webcomics - these guys are big time, but cost big bucks...host to PvP and Penny Arcade)