1and1 is cheap, reliable, and massive (traffic allowance and storage). Domain name registrations are cheap and easy, huge storage doubles as hard drive backup, easy web interface (sometimes sluggish) is great to add mail accounts, FTP, etc.

Don’t run your business off of 1and1, though… They sometimes do go down, or the shared machines (~10$/mo plans) get so CPU-busy that your site will be slow.

1and1 is probably the best deal for shared. Don’t look at their dedicated servers though. They’re expensive, and you have 0 flexibility (to upgrade RAM, bandwidth capacity, etc.)

If you’re looking at dedicated machines (good for running business off of), check out ServerBeach. They have fast machines on very good pipes (Peer1), and the customer service is awesome (they’ve just had a major electrical problem, after months of 100% uptime, but the communication was flawless and they fixed everything quickly. sales is also great; everybody there is very technical). Platform of choice to push online video, etc.

Finally, the sweetest pipes and geekiest colocation facility would be Hurricane Electric. The machines they rent are not incredible – the real value is when you BYOS (bring your own server). Get a 1 or 5Mbps pipe, and get to rocking.

Possible alternative (half 1and1-ish, half serverbeach-ish): iWeb, located in Montreal. Good to spread the risk across countries and east/west coasts.

I personally know some folks there and these people know what they are doing. Unlike most other web hosts, they don’t indulge in uncontrolled over-selling. They are also pioneering new models for shared hosting, built on Solaris Zones and ZFS — much more powerful and scalable than regular VPS. And affordable too!

Does it imply that shutting down of the webpage was due to some malicious act?

I’ve done a bit of web design for Bluehost, and I found every step to be agonizing. Seriously, it is pretty much the worst host that I’ve ever used for anything. Just… damn, ouch.

anon’s comment #19 that most web hosting is a scam is 100% correct. In my experience though, I’ve found DreamHost to be nearly 99% suck-free.

6. Webhosting review sites are even less honest than web hosts. All but a very tiny handful of webhosting review sites are *paid shills* who will grant top marks to the highest bidder.

1. Virtually all webhosts oversell their capacity to a huge degree. They offer what they literally cannot provide because they just don’t have the storage space, CPU resources, bandwidth or transfer allocations.

2. Every host that oversells will have severe reliability problems.

3. Getting a good host means finding one of the few hosts that don’t severely oversell. Figure out the wholesale costs for data center access and work backwards from there to determine what’s the minimum possible price for non-overselling accounts.

4. Many hosts will charge prices high enough that overselling is not necessary but will oversell anyway just to line their own pockets. You will often get less than you pay for.

5. The only truly reliable means of hosting is to either rent a dedicated server or colocate your own equipment.