Hi

My website is almost finished and I am now searching for a host. My site uses PHP and is standards-compliant (XHTML and CSS). What do you recommend?

Thanks
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Without any question the only web hosting company I can honestly recommend is Pair Networks.

I've tried many others, and have never found another hoster that I trust, and that has truly competent staff, high quality servers, etc.

Once you get into cheaper hosting, the problems rise more or less in direct inverse proportion to how cheap it is. The cheaper, the worse it is, that is, pretty much without any exception I've ever seen. Unfortunately, paying more does not guarantee good hosting, since lots of people out there will take your money happily, on the principle that the web breeds suckers, so they can always sell their server space.

The advanced shared hosting plan, when signed up for yearly, is the current best deal for aspiring webmasters, since you can also host other sites on that for only about $1 a month extra, that's real, dedicated IP extra accounts.

We have no interest in cheap hosting, since it's not worth our time to deal with the headaches that always come from trying to save a few dollars a month, so if you're looking for cheap hosting advice, you'll have to look elsewhere. For about half this price, you can host with mediatemple, which I don't like as a company at all since they have messed up so many times over the last year it's not even funny, but they are cheaper, and might be adequate for anyone with not very high expectations, and for people who really think that saving about $7 a month is worth the time you lose.
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Thanks for your answer.

pair.com seems to be a very good host but PHP is only available in the Advanced Account, which is quite expensive (18$/month).

Do you know another host?
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While it's not particularly impressive to me, mediatemple is ok. I want to emphasize the 'ok' however. Their uptime and server reliability isn't even remotely close to what pair offers.

But you get what you pay for. That's about $8 a month for the very cheapest.

And if you want to go even cheaper, and even more unreliable, you can use someone like digitalspace.net, at about $3, but don't complain when your servers go down routinely.

However, I want to emphasize this: I am not 'recommending' these hosters as equal or even remotely close to pair's year in and year out service level, but merely as cheaper hosting companies that are less bad than other one's I've tried.
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