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Ask YC: Good domain registrar & web hosting provider

6 points by arjungmenon ↗ HN
Which domain registrar and web hosting service do you think is reliable and cost-effective?

I'm need a website for my startup and my budget is low. (I'm a university student.)

10 comments

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thomaspaine
Depends on what type of website you're hosting. If you're going to host something simple like a wordpress blog or static content, I would suggest https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/. You only pay for the bandwidth that you use, as opposed to a normal monthly payment plan where you have a fixed amount of bandwidth. They have nice privacy protection options and you can also use them to register domains (I think $8.95 for a year).

The downside with nearly free speech is that you can't host persistent processes there, which means no Rails, Django, etc. apps. For my Django apps I've been using Webfaction, which I've been pretty happy with. The cheapest tier is a shared hosting environment for $9.95 a month, or $8.95 if you lock in for a year. That tier gives you enough memory and bandwidth to prototype and launch your apps with a small user base, and then if you need to, you can just upgrade your account.

Oh wait, I just noticed that you're a university student! You should check to see what your options are for hosting your website on the university network. Most schools give students free hosting options. I know plenty of people who host their websites on university accounts for free, although once you start getting hammered with traffic you might have to switch to a commercial host. You might have to go through the process of setting up your own server rather than just taking advantage of the pre-installed configuration you would get from a shared hosting environment like webfaction. But then again, learning how to configure apache can't hurt.

alecst
I second nearlyfreespeech. Their pricing is extremely affordable for smaller sites. Mine is hosted there, and I still haven't payed anything. Though slicehost would probably be more sensible if you're expecting heavy traffic.
patio11
Godaddy works fine for domains.

I also used them for hosting for the 18 months of my business, on a rinky-dink $4 a month shared hosting Linux account. It looks like its $5 now. No major complaints over that period, although for 10 days there were sporadic issues with an EXE getting corrupted on disk.

I'd still be there if I hadn't caught Rails fever, which is not that feasible on a shared host (even if you can do it, the other people on your server can't, and you'll probably suffer for it). If you also catch Rails fever, run, do not walk, towards getting a VPS -- I recommend Slicehost.

csbartus
shared hosts are for personal sites only, for a startup you'll need a VPS which does not oversells its capacity ... the (only) one i've found it's slicehost