I do not recommend you to use self-installation from hosts. It can cause problems for you on future upgrades. I recommend you to install WP manually.
About the hosts, if u want a cheap one go for BlueHost or HostGator. Nevermind DreamHost (their policies are the toughest ones).
Tho, if your site/blog daily hits get around 5k, I’d say for you to forget cheaper hosts. Or at least do use a caching system (some plugins available on WP website can do the job for u), it’ll help you to decrease comsumption of server resources.
Cheers
I don’t have any experience with either BlueHost or Hostso, but a quick Google indicates about 50% of the reviews of Hostso are extremely negative.
If you look hard enough, any popular web hosting company has some negative reviews. And, yes, sometimes it is the customer at fault.
But, 50% scares me.
Thanks for the great info. Hostso is off the table. What services do you recommend?
Just Host looks pretty good, any reviews there?
I have been “through” quite a few hosting companies over the last 10 years. But I’m really happy where I am now: Arvixe.com. I’ve been there a year now.
I haven’t used any of the hosting recommended by WordPress: http://wordpress.org/hosting/ But I have watched a friend’s grief with DreamHost, though it may be over now as they spent the last 6-12 months moving their data centre, and had lots of painful outages.
I’ve read through a bunch of Just Host reviews and a lot of them are quite scary, so I’m back to finding another host. Thanks for recommending Arvixe, though it is $7 per month and I’m trying to keep it under $5.
It’s weird that Just Host has gotten so many bad reviews seeing as its recommended by WP, I guess I’ll have to keep looking. Any other recommendations?
Any large hosting company is bound to have bad reviews because they deal with so many people that a few of them are going to have a bad experience and are going to complain about it… and it adds up from there. I have been with BlueHost for several years now and have hosted many WordPress sites with different themes, plugins, etc., and they have been absolutely great for me. I refer my friends to them as well and my friends have been happy with them. Another host which I have not personally tried but which has been recommended by a few of the people on these forums is ASO.
Good luck and happy hunting!
Arvixe pricing can be a bit confusing. It actually works out to $2.77/month if you prepay for two years, because they include a free domain name registration, which would cost you $10/year otherwise. And a 10% discount (given as a monthly credit) if you include a link to Arvixe on the home page of your web site. If you google around, you can find coupons that will give you another 10-20% off your first year, knocking it down even more.
The actual prices are $4/month if you prepay for two years, $5/month if you prepay for one year, $6/month if you prepay for 6 months and $7/month if you pay monthly. And all include the free domain name registration.
When I started with them, I paid monthly for the first month, to make sure everything would work properly for me, then I immediately switched to annual because the Reseller plan I have stops discounting the monthly price when you prepay for a year. By the way, I don’t actually Resell anything (yet?), but a friend and I do share the account. The real advantage of Reseller is the isolated FileSystems you get for each domain name, which is really great for ensuring that Test Systems don’t clobber Production Systems. For example, my Test System cannot even access the databases of the Production Systems!
