As far as VPS providers go, I can recommend slicehost. I had a vps with them for aprox a year and it was very good. Now I use Amazon Web Services which are exceptional but not necessarily suited to every site.

I helped 2 guys set up Wordpress sites on GoDaddy and the pageloading was like lolslow, maybe it was the theme, idk.

I use hostgator shared hosting for like 5 pages on the same account all wordpress with wp-super-cache and I have excellent loading times even with "high" usage.

Avoid GoDaddy for hosting imo, everything I have heard about them has lead me to avoid them like the plague (although I do use them for domain registration)

Seriously avoid them for domain registration as well if you can! I moved all my domains to http://www.webwiz.co.uk, for one central manageable location. Godaddy upsell to death and make trivial domain management an absolute nightmare.

That upselling is so annoying. After I registered one domain with godaddy I realized how stupid I was and found namecheap.com which is pretty awesome so far.

$1 domain available on GoDaddy.

http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2854917

Yeah I know I hate their checkout procedures and stuff too, but I have so many domains there that I'm too lazy to switch.

Dreamhost gets a lot of **** for overloading their shared hosting, but it is only half-valid in my opinion. They are great for hosting a lot of low-load sites, even dynamic ones. I have a bunch of low traffic wordpress and drupal sites that do just fine there.

Finally got around to transferring all my domains from godaddy to namecheap, very happy with it, and cheaper as well.

Linode is still my choice for VPS and any of the places out there that will do macmini co-los out there for dedicated servers.

Hm. Transferring pretty simple? I might do that to namecheap if it's not too hard; I really can't stand GoDaddy. The only reason I use them is because of the random $1 domains they have every two months or so.

Site5's shared hosting has been nothing but awesome and the service is unbelievably good. I use them for my 8 blogs/random sites where I have about 40 GB of files. I build large databases (the last one was ~2 GB) on my local machine and upload a SQL dump to their server, open a ticket, and they import them for me since phpmyadmin isn't going to handle that and remote MySQL is treacherous for that.

There's a few minor complaints, but overall, they're great. The VPS services are a bit expensive - we use them at my place of work at $50/month for managed service - so I would probably use Linode or another provider, but for shared hosting, I can't recommend it enough. Slightly more expensive than most at $9/month for the unlimited domains package, but the cPanel skins and customer service really make it worthwhile.

I would definitely recommend Site5 over Dreamhost, given that they are the same price.

So I am confused about Amazon's offerings.

Is there a way to host a normal php application with them? If so, which of their 2059832058 services with ambiguous titles would I need to look into? Any thoughts on this?

Amazon basically offers virtual dedicated servers. When you request a new server, it comes with no software installed, and you can choose various 'images' to install on it. These 'images' are basically various flavours of linux, some of which come with software preinstalled (there are also windows images available).

I usually choose a basic ubuntu install, and then log into my newly created 'box' and install apache, php, mysql... and any other software I might need.

There is an ubuntu getting started guide here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EC2StartersGuide

Be aware that using amazon aws requires you to do a lot of sysadmin work, so if you dont have a sysadmin, or are not a sysadmin youself and dont want to spend hours trawling the internet for tutorials on how to set up a webserver, you might be better looking for a pre setup solution.

Thanks MrWooster, sysadmin stuff is not my strong suit so maybe it's not for me. What are the biggest advantage of it for you?

For me, setting up my server on Amazon Web Services to host my blog, some scripts etc, was a huge learning curve. When I first started I knew nothing about sysadmin and it took me about 3 days to set it up.

Now I can load up a fresh server from scratch (doesnt necessarily have to be on amazon) in a matter of hours. Although I am by no stretch of the imagination a sysadmin, for someone like myself in the software industry, I think this is quite a valuable skill to have.

aside from providing a learning experience, what are the main benefits to using amazon as a web host vs a traditional hosting company?

Ah, sorry misread the question slightly.

The main attraction to Amazon is that you pay by the hour and only for the resources you use, whereas traditional hosting providers charge you a fixed monthly fee regardless of what you use. For companies who have varying demands, this can work out a lot cheaper.

AWS is also more flexible... you can, in a matter of minutes, upgrade, downgrade, clone, stop, start your servers. Something that would take a lot of time on traditional hosting providers.

Amazon tends to be priced pretty competitively... instances tend to be slightly cheaper, or the same price per month (price per hour * 24 * days in month) as their counterparts from traditional hosting providers.

Finally, Amazon provides a very reliable service. Data is backed up all over the place, and their networks are very solid.

However, hot on the heels of amazon are many other 'cloud hosting providers' who are offering similar services, so the competition is hotting up, but in general, cloud hosting providers allow you to build a more flexible web infrastructure.

the cost scales Vs cpu and bandwidth use iirc. so it's cheap or extremely powerful depending on load.

so if there was some kind of unexpected server problem, or something like a dos attack on your server, would you be able to be back up and running almost instantly on amazon?

Yes... and also it should be noted that one of the disadvantages of cloud servers is that there is no cap on your bill... so if you forget to turn one of your instances off... or you have a massive surge in bandwidth... you will get billed for it at the end of the month.

Yes... I have a script that creates 'snapshots' of my server every day. The snapshots are essentially disk images of you server in its current state. If my server was to crash or go down, it would take me a matter of minutes to 'activate' the latest snapshot and my server would be restored to the exact state that it was when the snaphot was taken.

This happened to me when I thought I was on their "free" plan. Fortunately, they refunded my money.

AWS is awesome. Just overkill for most applications, unless you are interested in learning about sysadmin and scalable interfaces. I really love it and hope to use it in the near future for larger-scale apps.

Also, isn't the "learning experience" required anyhow running any sort of VPS / dedi?

Yes... but I think AWS takes it to the next level. Especially when you start to integrate EBS (their virtual file systems) and S3 (static file storage).

Agreed. But it's a good thing to learn, since in a few years the majority of tech jobs will require some competency with AWS/EBS/S3. It's absolutely the way to go compared to traditional VPS/Dedicated setups - it kills on price and scalability.

I assume some VPS or dedicated providers will do the setup for a fee.

Being able to setup your own web stack is pretty handy though, especially if you're involved in a startup or need to move a client over from shared hosting to something more powerful.

I don't think a majority of tech jobs will require some knowledge of this.

Imagine going to a site where you can develop your code, interact with github, and push your code to a production server after filling out a few forms in a few minutes.

That is the future of web development and it makes sense. Web developers should be writing code, not trying to administrate the server it's running on.

Having the knowledge to do this is by no means bad, but every minute you spend learning to do this is another minute wasted that could be spent coding or learning more about software development.

I agree in theory. But as I've said many times in the past, cursory knowledge of these things is already desired by many employers. As productivity increases, outsourcing improves, and companies seek to reduce costs (labor), "desired" starts to become "required."