That’s the question a weekend New York Times article sought to answer. The fact is, there’s no clear-cut answer. But for us non-superstars of the Internet, my favorite Web hosting company is NearlyFreeSpeech.Net. Why? Their pay-as-you-go, pay-for-only-what-you-use hosting plan.
Like many people, I own a bunch of domain names, most of which are nearly dormant, but I want to keep them online to satisfy the Googlebeast. Before NFSN I was paying GoDaddy $3-10 bucks a month for each domain, but now I pay literally a penny or two a day for a few of my sites, and nothing at all for most of the others.
One NFSN account can have unlimited domains, so I drop $5-10 in my account and it keeps me runnin’ for months. You can open up an account with as little as $.25. Disk storage? A penny/MB per month. That’s right, one penny per MONTH.
No sales reps, no commissions, no pressure. No tacky pinup girls or extreme political BS. Also, unfortunately, no tech support, except FAQ pages. That means NFSN is probably not the best choice for beginners. While most of their directions are clear and easy to implement, if you do have problems, you’ll have to figure it out on your own — or call your 14 year old neighbor.
PS: I am not afiliated with NFSN nor do I receive anything for this endorsement. I just like their service.
The NYTimes list does talk about few points that are good for any small business. We use a hosting company called bluehost that has excellent uptime and can serve the pages fast. For small to micro businesses or people with multiple domain names this is a good bet. Majority of the hosting companies are now giving unlimited space, bandwidth and free domain add-ons with 100 MySql databases.
Tom – This blog and your other site mainecreative seem to be slow. Did anybody else mention this?