YAWH(Web Hosting)T - Cheap and featureless is fine with me!

[Injury]

I've been using E-Rice (www.e-rice.net) for a few years now and I have to renew in January, and as much as I love rewarding good service with repeat business I can't help but thinking that it's almost TOO featureless. (Gotta keep it cheap somehow, eh?)

I mostly use my site for personal blog, pictures, and randomocities. It doesn't get much traffic, which is fine, but my photo collection has gotten big enough that I'm pushing the space limits on their max plan.

They've since changed plans so you won't be able to see what sorts of things I get from their front page, but it's basically 500MB space, 10GB Transfer for about $38/yr... Which is beyond good considering what more mainstream hosts offer, but as stated previously, it's so cheap because it's kind of a small potatoes operation with few features.

Are there any hosts that would work better for me than others? I know a lot of people recommend some forum member's hosts, and I'm not opposed to that, I'd just like to be able to do it much cheaper. I mean, a no-profit rarely visited personal site doesn't necessarily warrant paying $100/yr, ya know?

I'd like to be able to get space that has:
-1000MB space
-reasonable amount of bandwidth
-PHP
-at least 2 MySql databases
-the extensions/programs necessary to run Wordpress and Coppermine
-in the US

subdomains, lots of email addresses, shopping carts, support for all the latest and greatest languages are NOT important to me.


http://cookiehost.com/ looks like something I could go with (as mentioned in other posts) but their site looks really goofy for a hosting company and would just like to get some confirmation that they are worthwhile. edit: I talked with their support chat and asked if the rates are locked in and they seemed to indicate that they are NOT. So that's kinda stupid. The current sale price of $39.95 would be PERFECT... but if the same sale isn't going on when I renew I wouldn't want to pay $59.95.

Am I being too cheap or is ~$60 the range for what I want?

 

[RossMAN]

Originally posted by: Injury
Am I being too cheap or is ~$60 the range for what I want?

Yes you are but that's ok 95% of AT'ers fall in your category. There are very few which are willing to pay for quality which is a damn shame.

Here are some suggestions (not recommendations):

http://www.hostpc.com/index.php

CookieHost.com
Several AT'ers have posted their impressions of uptime, speed and support.

If you're feeling adventurous there is another option for $22 per year which offers A LOT but there is a catch.

I'll reply with more information later, if I remember.

P.S. Unless you switch to a quality web host which uses the same control panel as e-rice.net you will have to manually transfer your existing email/FTP/MySQL databases yourself.

 

[Injury]

So maybe my misunderstanding is that a lot of what people pay for isn't all the advertised features such as a nice Control Panel, all the supported languages and so forth but rather the space, bandwidth, and support? Basically that all the "fluff" and features on most site's package details is more or less just crap to excite people who don't know if they need it or not?

Like, I've been running my site and doing this long enough that I know what I need, but if what is supported isn't what brings the price tag then I suppose I can open up the wallet a little bit more. I just felt that it was stupid to pay for features that I wouldn't use.