Website Hosting

[invert_nexus]

I'm planning on starting a website. Been thinking about it for some time now and am finally getting on the ball about it.
I had originally started the plan with the fear that sciforums was going to turn into a totalitarian police state, but that hasn't happened (thank Moloch) but I still want to set up my own little home on the range.

However, I'm naive about bandwidth and hosting issues.

I originally considered using ASmallOrange as it was the hosting service that Dave used after the last forum crash and it had done pretty well for us except for a brief time when some other site on the same server as ours kept getting DOS'd for a while there.

Anyway.
I don't know what to do.
There's another hosting company that is being promoted on some create your own website site, and the deal seems pretty good.

It's only 70 bucks for a year and it's got a lot of features.
But, I'm suspicious that it is TOO much.

Here's the stats I'm looking at in particular.

ASO Medium Plan:
1000 Megabytes storage.
25 Gigabytes bandwidth.
10 dollars a month (100 per year with discount for year's package.)

Powweb:
40,000 MB storage.
800 Gigs/month bandwidth (26+ Gigs per day)
$69.24 per year.

ASO will be a registrar and sell a domain name for a year for 10 bucks.
POW offers a domain name for 1 year free with the 1 year package.

http://www.asmallorange.com/services/hosting/
http://www.powweb.com/powweb/hosting.bml

So.
Basically, my question is... is the POW offer a good one? It offers the same amount of bandwidth as the medium ASO package for a substantially reduced price.
I am wondering if perhaps their servers are slow or something else, is there a way to find out?
Are there any hosts that anyone here might recommend?

My needs will likely be small at the beginning.

Basically, it's going to be a blog/news site. Just articles of interest and whatnot on the front page. I might find other sections to add as time goes by. Nothing too bandwidth intensive, I should imagine.
I'm also going to set up a vBulletin forum on the site.
It'll most likely start out slow and pick up speed (or not) as time goes by. But, I'm just not sure what type of bandwidth is recommended.

At the moment, I'm tempted to take the POW offer, but I am leery of the way it was so shamelessly plugged on the create your own website site.
(That website also plugged a site called Site Build It! as the end all and be all of hosting companies. It has a 250 dollar a year package that offers a lot, but I don't think I need all their services. Not at this stage anyway. Anyone heard of it?
https://secure.sitesell.com/build/order.html)

Any suggestions?
I'm sure some of you out there can help me, right?

[Stryder]

I apologise the following post wont seem fluant, however it's nearly 5am and well I'm trying to cram as much as I can in to cover the topic.

From experience if you intend to run a Blog or Vbulletin site any Shared Server packages might not be enough. Such software is extremely Bandwidth intensive and heavy on the processor power when the numbers of posters are high.

By all means though start small and just look for ways to expand later on.

I would suggest looking for a company that will allow you to have control over your DNS record. It's all very well getting a domain like www.foobar.com, however if you expand and want to start using subdomains, or running your own mailserver it's best to have the ability to add those subdomains and MX records.
With the company I use they allow the DNS record to point to any Server via IP or even point to a third-party DNS Server via IP for your domain record.

As mentioned Bandwidth is important, be it that you housing one file that everyone wants to download or running a Forum. Whats most important though is that you aren't hooked up to an extortionate tarriff should you go over your quota (or worse still have "downtime").

When running a Dedicated Server in one of the UK Backbones I actually had the option to have unlimited bandwidth for UK use, obviously being priced on any external accesses from abroad.

Dedicated's are by far the most expensive to go, however they are what every budding internet website owner dreams of. If you can put together a site using a cheaper option, get not just an audience but a population on your site then you should be able to look at ways where they can help put the cost together for the best equipment/service.

The main problem I've always had with my endevours however is a mixture of Time & Effort (Notibly the Learning curve), Training, Money and Ingenuity since there is no point making Yet Another Site thats the same as everyone elses.

As for actually building a site... well you're going to need to be good with graphics/graphicsoftware if you don't want to use the stock images that people usually reuse over and over again. When it comes to actually building the site you then have the nightmare of deciding what language to use in regards to what server software your package is running. (No point scripting in Python if your server doesn't run a Python interpreter)

Lets just say it can be quite daunting just to put a simple 6 page website together Hope that hasn't put you off.

[draqon]

http://www.hostmonster.com/

200 Gigabytes of Hosting Space
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SSH Access (Secure Shell)
2,000 Gigs of Transfer
SSL, FTP, Stats
CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MYSQL
Front Page Extensions
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[Avatar]

I've been using Hostgator for some time now.
Apart from some minor support needs at the beginning it's been quite a flawless (and cheap) experience.

[Alva]

I have access to free web hosting actually...

For free, i get 5gigs of hosting space...


but I'd recommend a site for you to use, to moniter over a various amount of providers

http://www.hostinghour.com/

[LeeDa]

I use a company called www.110mb.com. It's a free hosting package where you get 2gb storage and 100gb transfer per month. They have an option to upgrade to a hostgator plan if you need it later where you get more storage and 1000gb a month transfer.

I'd perhaps recommend starting out with free hosting until the work has been done on your site and your making heaps of traffic.

Here is a link with heaps of other free web hosting packages. http://free-web-hosting.110mb.com/