In late June 2009 I set up a website for myself and a few relatives. These are notes on how I choose the web hosting provider, with an emphasis on pointing out the resources I found useful while making the decision.

As I was researching web hosting services, I noticed that many of the pages at the top of search results are poorly-disguised advertising with little useful content. Typically the author gets a kickback if you use his link to sign up for the service he's touting, or if you type in his referral code. I hope my notes make it easier for you to get useful information.

Prices and specs are what was in effect at the time, for the plan I would have chosen, assuming a one-year contract. The industry is always in flux, so things have certainly changed since.

Requirements

I started by figuring out my requirements:

Budget has a hard-cap of $20/month, prefer less than $10/month. Prepay annually.
UNIX hosting with shell access via SSH. A slight preference for Debian, but really any Linux of BSD variant is fine, as long as the stack is free software.
Modest bandwidth and storage. I'll reassess after a year to see how much we actually use.
Access to cgi-bin, MySQL, PHP.
Prefer if the hosting service handles email. Less important feature than it used to be, now that Google apps exists.
Website hosted under my own domain name (chippingsparrow.com not example.com/chippingsparrow).
Option to use more than one domain name.
Domain name privately registered, so my name/address don't appear in whois. This is a knee-jerk requirement, probably irrational. My name is on the website, and is uncommon enough that anybody with a bit of gumption can track me down.
Data center located in the US.
Track record of at least a few years.
Company that runs their own servers, not a reseller.
Access to the server logs, to find out how often search engines are crawling my site, and also which searches are leading people to my pages.
No ads.

The last two items rule out most free hosting services, although they're standard with hosting one pays for. None of my requirements are unusual, though the cheapest plans often don't provide SSH or MySQL.

There are also a few things you might want that weren't on my requirements list, including: Ruby on Rails; dedicated IP address; encrypted web hosting using SSL/HTTPS; WebDAV (e.g. for sharing your calendar); Front Page extensions; Usenet. None of these are exotic, but if you need them check, since they're not included in many plans.

Choosing a hosting provider

Things to look for: the support section of the host's website usually has answers to most questions about their offerings. Check to make sure they provide reports of unscheduled downtime.

Self hosting

I never gave serious thought to running my own server at home. I don't already have a computer running 7/24, and no desire to buy additional hardware to make that possible. And we're likely to move in the next year, which would mean downtime. So I never checked if running a server is possible using our cable modem. (Many broadband providers ban running a server, either by contract or technical means.)

For fun I calculated how much it would have cost to self host. My electric rate at home is about $0.17/kilowatt hour. (Your rate is probably lower. Read it off the bill or see average electricity cost by state.) A 100 watt server uses about 73 kilowatt hours per month. That works out to an electric bill of about $12.50/month. (100 watts may well be an overestimate on power use.)

Virtual private server (VPS)

I gave serious consideration to renting a VPS on top of Xen virtualization. This provides root on the virtual machine, with one's choice of Linux distro. The physical hardware is shared by multiple virtual machines. The big advantage of VPS is that one can run whatever software one wants. The big disadvantage is that one has to administer the virtual machine. (Managed VPS plans, where someone else handles the system administration, exist but are way outside my budget.) I narrowed the short list down to:

Linode: Highly recommended by several LUG members. Linode provides DNS, but doesn't do domain registration. $20/month for 360MB RAM, 16GB disk, 200GB bandwidth.

Slice Host: Seems to be the market leader. Rackspace subsidiary. $20/month for 256MB RAM, 10GB disk, 100GB bandwidth.

VPS Link: Spry subsidiary. The only one of these three to offer cut-rate plans with less than 256MB of RAM. $20/month for 256MB RAM, 10GB disk, 300GB bandwidth.

Some useful links: Low end box is focused on cut-rate VPS hosting. A comparison of Linode and Slicehost. Another comparison of Linode and Slicedhost.

In the end I decided that the extra capabilities of VPS aren't worth an extra $10/month to me, nor worth the extra hassle of administering a virtual machine. So I chose shared hosting instead. Had I gone with VPS, I'd have signed up with Linode.

Shared hosting

There are a zillion shared hosting services. I didn't pay a lot of attention to what happens if you overrun on bandwidth, but many hosts do charge for extra use. My short list consisted of what friends were using:

Dream Host: Used by Sebastian. He's been happy with them, but I've noticed his web pages always take a long time to load. Debian. $9.95/month with no published disk/bandwidth limits.

Hawk Host: Used by Carl. They use a proprietary web server (Lite Speed, which has an odious EULA). CentOS. $3.29/month for 3GB disk, 30GB bandwidth.

1 & 1: Used by Larsson. UK company, but they also have a US data center. Linux distro not specified. $9.99/month for 250GB disk, 2500 GB bandwidth.

Pair: Used by John. Impressive list of customers, and a good reputation. Telephone support. Employee benefits package covers Audubon membership dues. FreeBSD. $30 setup. $19.95/month for 1.5GB disk, 80GB bandwidth.

Pair Lite: Pair's cut-rate brand. Firm usage limits, with no overruns possible. FreeBSD. $30 setup. $8.33/month for 2GB disk, 50GB bandwidth.

Go Daddy: Used by Arthur (and Colin?). See No Daddy for customer testimonials. Linux distro not specified. $6.99/month for 150GB disk, 1500GB bandwidth.

Nearly Free Speech: I don't know anybody using them. Made my list because of their unusual pay-as-you-use micropayment billing. FreeBSD. No monthly fee, instead $0.01/day for MySQL, $0.01/MB/month disk, $1/GB bandwidth.

Probably anybody on the short list would work. I signed up with Pair Lite. After one year I'll reevaluate.

Registering a domain

Choosing a domain name was more difficult than I expected. Everybody who is going to use the domain had to agree on the name. We went through dozens of candidates that were already taken, typically by a squatter who wasn't even using the domain, before we found something available that we liked.

Most web hosting services let you register the domain name at the same time you sign up for hosting. The cost of the domain is often included in a one-year contract. A few of the bigger outfits are registrars themselves, but most are just resellers.

However, the conventional wisdom is that one should register the domain with a different registrar than one's hosting provider, so as to reduce the probability of problems when changing services. In practice few people use a separate registrar. All of my friends are using their hosting service for the domain as well, so far without problems.

I was waffling about VPS vs. shared hosting up until the last minute. Because Linode doesn't do domain registration, and Pair didn't offer private registration (they added it a few weeks later), I registered the domain with name.com. $8.99/year for a .com, including private registration. I couldn't find any compelling reasons to choose one registrar over another, apart from price.

Useful resources

Bayle Shanks's tips on computer webhosting has lots of good background info. Found while searching; I don't know the author.

The Wikipedia entry on domain name registrars has useful background information. The article implies each .com domain costs the registrar $7.06/year.

The Web Hosting Talk forums have useful reviews and discussion. Be sure to check the dates the posting was made and the poster joined the forum.

The Name Pros forums have discussion about domain names and registrars. I didn't find this as useful as WHT.

An inconclusive thread discussing domain registrars on the Linode forum.

To test if an available domain has been used in the past check the Internet Archive, Yahoo Site Explorer, and do a web search of the form "link:example.com". I wanted a domain that hadn't already been used by somebody else. (Many people want a domain that already has links pointing in to it, hoping to juice their page rank.)

A search of the form "example.com coupon code" or "example.com promo code" is often successful. I saved 9% ($0.79!) on my domain registration this way.

A table/chart of registrar market share. I couldn't find similar information on web hosting services.

A list of web hosting services using Debian, and a list of web hosting services using Ubuntu.

I didn't find Netcraft's uptime ratings to be useful. The problem is that Netcraft looks at the hosting company's homepage, which is almost surely not on the server that would handle my account. There is anecdotal evidence that at many web hosting companies service varies considerably depending on which server one is assigned to; to estimate how reliable the provider will be one needs an estimate of how big that variance is.