Julie’s Recommended Web Hosting Provider

(Update in December 2015: I still use this provider and I still recommend them!)

This is a question that I am asked all the time: “do you have a recommendation for a good hosting provider?” You know what? I do.

In August 2009 I wrote a ProfHacker post called Website Hosting 101 which explains what a hosting provider does, how to use it, and what to look for (or, what makes a good hosting provider) such as reliability/server uptime, customer service, bandwidth, domain name purchase and mangement, price, scripting languages and database support, and having a good control panel for host management. Also in that post (and in Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours, 8th ed.) I linked to several perfectly good hosting providers, all of which I have used in some way…yet I did not name a favorite.

I’ve always had a favorite, though. Well, at least since mid-2005, when I started using Daily Razor. That’s right: my #1 web hosting provider recommendation is DAILY RAZOR.

[For the truly geeky/curious, for the seven or so years before that, I ran my sites/sites for clients off a couple 1U rackmount servers that I built from parts, which we had sitting in a cabinet at Hurricane Electric. Sometimes I would go visit the servers in the summer just to say hi, and because it was nice and cool in the server room. Still really like the HE folks.]

So, I’ve used Daily Razor for almost six years now. Never had a malfunction, deletion, anything more than a totally acceptable period of downtime (a couple minutes here and there, usually detected and dealt with before I could finishing the trouble ticket); always have excellent and timely responses to tickets. Great price, great offering, great service—everything I look for a hosting provider.

Some things of note for developers:

• Of course they offer standard PHP & MySQL web hosting packages, and the most basic of them all is perfectly good for most hosting needs (e.g. your standard personal/academic/course web site with WordPress or another blogging platform, and/or with Omeka, etc)
• But they also offer basic Ruby on Rails hosting packages for a couple bucks a month as well, and if that isn’t enough…
• They even offer JSP & Tomcat hosting packages (these come in at $12 or so per month but that’s a great deal…if you know you want to run Tomcat you probably also already know that’s a good deal).

At various points over the years, and for various purposes, I’ve had all of these different hosting packages and they’ve been top-notch.

So! There you have it: Daily Razor is my recommendation for a good hosting provider.