Web hosting, I need your help and advice

[Cairnie]

Heya, I'm in a massive rut right now regarding my own website which is currently hosted on my ISP's webspace that's only 55MB. I've been thinking for a really long time about buying a new host, preferably one that can take in a PHPbb forum and a coppermine gallery, and moving my site onto it as well as making new ones.

So would anyone care to give some advice on how to do this? I've never paid for webspace before so I'm finding it a bit scary looking at web host sites that promise to be cheap and provide unlimited disk space.
Cheers.

[stan423321]

Free + unlimited = Lies.

Find one limited. Limit can be bigger, but find one limed. End, commas, dot.

[Cairnie]

Well I need at least 1GB of disk space because I've got a SHITLOAD of images to host ranging from screenshots to book scans.

[stan423321]

Well, so maybe make a decompressing program on your site? I don't know PHP at all, but I think it is possible...

[Xenon]

I don't know many examples of web hosters that offer paid service, but it's definitely a better option than to go with a free hoster, like Freewebs. Maybe you could ask Hunchman about the hoster he uses.

[Hunchman801]

You need 1 GB of disk space, right? Three questions then: How much do you want to pay? Do you expect many people to view or download your hosted files? What script languages will you need (basically, you can do almost everything you need with PHP and a MySQL database)?
It's obvious that you won't need a whole server like PC, but I can still help you to find an adapted web hoster

[Cairnie]

I won't need a whole server, and PHP's pretty much all I'm gonna need as far as scripts are concerned. My site's had about 15,000 hits since it launched in 2006, so I should imagine that some of the visitors do come to download the images, but at the moment my forum only has 37 members and only a handful of them post regularly. That's the trouble with making fansites on 80's cartoons, most people are like "ooh I remember this" and just walk off.

As for money, I don't wanna end up paying hundreds worth of hidden costs. I found one place that offers for £4.99 a month, which I probably can afford for monthly billing but I don't know whether it's better to pay monthly or yearly. I only get up to £20 a fortnight so uh...I need a job :'(

In honestly I can only hope that it's all worth it because free hosting just sucks, I've had to resort to it one time too many.

[Hunchman801]

£5 a month seems quite expensive for your needs. If you look here, there are interesting offers: 600 MB for £0.90 and 900 MB for £3.90, domain included. If I were you, I'd be smart and order two 60 GPs (600 MB each) for £1.80, because you aren't going to need all those features added in the 90 Plan. This would not be a problem because you only need disk space for data storage, and your database will certainly not exceed 1 GB, considering that the one of Pirate-Community is only 350 MB big. Moreover, you'd even have a second domain name this way.
Another interesting hoster is 1&1, there's a promotion for the 1&1 Home offer, but you'll pay full price the next year. The domain name seems free too, but I find the offer quite expensive though. It's a shame only American citizens can order on the US 1&1 website, because prices are twice as cheap.

[Joshua822]

All i can tell you is that you should make sure that you should search for a good host that offers you hosting on a LAMP (LInux Apache MySQL and PHP) configurated system to host your site on, you are going to use PHP and MySQL, they both work best on a Apache webserver and Apache works better on a Linux sever.

[Cairnie]

£5 a month seems quite expensive for your needs. If you look here, there are interesting offers: 600 MB for £0.90 and 900 MB for £3.90, domain included. If I were you, I'd be smart and order two 60 GPs (600 MB each) for £1.80, because you aren't going to need all those features added in the 90 Plan. This would not be a problem because you only need disk space for data storage, and your database will certainly not exceed 1 GB, considering that the one of Pirate-Community is only 350 MB big. Moreover, you'd even have a second domain name this way.
Another interesting hoster is 1&1, there's a promotion for the 1&1 Home offer, but you'll pay full price the next year. The domain name seems free too, but I find the offer quite expensive though. It's a shame only American citizens can order on the US 1&1 website, because prices are twice as cheap.

I'll have to talk to my mum about that one then, since on my own I can only pay for shit with paypal.

But 90p a month sounds very good. How I'm gonna fit all of my images into 600MB is a question of whether or not I really need that many up [by the time I go through every single episode of Count Duckula I'm gonna end up with thousands of screenshots]. That's why I currently use livejournal for that, it provides a whole gig of space but the layouts are ass.

[Hunchman801]

All i can tell you is that you should make sure that you should search for a good host that offers you hosting on a LAMP (LInux Apache MySQL and PHP) configurated system to host your site on, you are going to use PHP and MySQL, they both work best on a Apache webserver and Apache works better on a Linux sever.

Almost all hosters use Linux servers with Apache anyway ^^
Also, Stacey, maybe you should order one 60 GP hosting plan, and once you need more than 600 MB, order another one ^^

[Cairnie]

Right then, I'll start making my plans, thanks everyone!