Webhosting for Dummies!

So I've been considering moving my modest little bunch of websites for a while now, given that I've been leeching off my older brother's servers for the better part of the past 5 years. Poking around the old google machine provides a plethora of choices that may or may not provide what I need for the amount of money that I'm willing to pay, and I always end up postponing my move.

L-Robot disagrees with having to pay filthy humans for webspace, and suggested that I exploderize the internet and be done with it. (Obviously not an option.) Her next suggestion of putting together a list of pros and cons of affordable hosting was much more helpful, except for the fact that I am: 1) Lazy and 2) Much too busy and important to do so.

Of course, given that no idea on the internet is free means that someone out there has already done this for me, and those someones are the folks at webhostinggeeks.com.

Those of you looking for web hosting would best be served by hopping down to WHG's delightful list of user-reviewed hosting services. It's kind of like an amazon comments section for webhosting, which means you get to hear real people talk about the services they use. And best of all, you get to choose the criteria with which you can view the best-ranked webhosts (i.e. by budget, blog compatibility, free domain, multiple domain hosting, etc.)

Browsing around the site actually made me want to leave a review for my current host, which looked like this:

Name: my big brother's server
Price: free!!
Rank: 5 stars
Review: My brother gives me a little bit of space on his big bad server cuz I'm his little sister. If something breaks, I call him up and whine. He's excellent at tech support! If you want to apply for this host, you can't because you're not his little sister. So there! :P

I decided against it in the end, of course, given that most of the site's reviewers are (kind of) more articulate. ;) The geeks also have a lovely little blog up, which contains useful information for those of you who care about whether or not getting merchant accounts is a good idea (I do) and the merits of having keyword-rich domain names (I don't).

I haven't actually decided which host I'm going with yet, but I will say that the 1.99 per month webhosting on their best budget section sounds mighty fine!