It’s open to any PowerShell user groups or script clubs. If you’re running a PowerShell user group and want simple web-hosting with:

• top-of-the-site billing for your group (with a url like http://powershellgroup.org/rochester-ny )
• group signups
• events, calendars and event signups (including sending out RSVP emails to your group), and email reminders of events
• a semi-private group section for posting notices, wiki pages, etc.

• optional twitter notification for your posts

Just let me know who you are after you sign up on the site, and I can set you up with “group administrator” rights.

Also, if you have your own web hosting for your user group, but would like to be listed on our site, we can handle that too

The only catch is that they appear to be sort of forcing the GNU FDL on you, which could cause problems for people who would prefer some other license (like a Creative Commons license, perhaps?) and although Memory Alpha was able to get a different deal, one doubts that anyone else would — Memory Alpha is a 7-Million hits per month site which brings in some serious ad revenue.

At any rate, Wikia’s OpenServing service will be giving away hosting in a MediaWiki derivative in exchange for links back to Wikia. Not just that, but according to this article on eWeek they are hoping to become a sort of unified hosting based on open source website software such WordPress and Drupal. In fact, they’re open to suggestions, so if you are a web software developer and have some other open source software you’re willing to help them install and maintain on their servers … they want to hear from you.

The baseline account that I usually compare to is the $7 hosting from BlueHost which currently offers 30GB of storage and 750GB of bandwidth … but of course, I don’t need a quarter of that (actually, right now I have only 500MB of storage, and I use less than 2GB of transfer on this domain). So I started wondering if there’s anyone cutting them up smaller than that.

Here’s my table. Note: I assume that every host has PHP, Perl and Python (ASP.NET for MS hosting), a database, and email accounts with some version of spam protection. There’s two price columns because nearly everyone offers a huge discount if you sign up for several years, so I’ve listed the monthly price for the long-term and short-term prices, not including the setup fee that some charge (although I’ve listed setup fees as bummers). Note: I can’t recommend these, since I’ve never used them .

Here’s my usual high ends, they have huge ammounts of everything, you know, dozens of databases and hundreds of email accounts … the idea is that you can run big commercial sites or sublease …

So anyway. The Dreamhost thing still appeals to me because of the extras, by which I mean Jabber and SVN and WebDAV, and they do have a 3 month money-back guarantee, but on the other hand…. I’m already on 1&1, and you just can’t beat their-low cost plans for price/performance, and lets face it, I don’t really use python, ruby, or even my shell account — I’ve got my own Linux box, thanks.

Anyone have any other thoughts or suggestions?

$4.99 for 120GB of space, and 1200GB monthly transfer volume. You even get 25 MySQL databases, 10 FTP accounts, and the usual scripting languages (Perl, Python, PHP). You have full ability to host multiple domains and subdomains — you even get two domain names free, and 1200 email accounts.

Edit:

I’m in the process of moving some of my domains back to 1and1, because they offer pure domain name registration services now, and they’re cheaper than GoDaddy (with the possible exception of the initial “new signup” bonuses that GoDaddy tempts you with).

Actually, they have a new $4/mo account which is more than enough for the average site: $3.99 includes the domain, and 10GB of space and 300GB of transfer, as well as the ability to have subdomains and multiple external domains, and up to 10 databases and 600 email accounts. It does have PHP 4 and 5, but not Perl or Python at that price.

BlueHost

Normally I suggest BlueHost, which offers 10GB 15GB of disk space and 250GB 400GB of transfer in addition to a free for life domain, self-generated SSL certificates and all the usual stuff like PHP, Ruby on Rails and Fantastico and shell access … for only $6.95 a month (if you sign up for two years). Honestly that’s still the cheapest hosting around, long-term.

DreamHost

However, DreamHost has to be the most interesting deal I’ve seen, and actually may have more bang for the buck than BlueHost! Their $7.95 a month (for two years) is only a dollar more than BlueHost, and you can save $30 off that by using GEOSHELL as your coupon code, which actually makes it cheaper than BlueHost for the first 2 years … and they offer 20GB of disk space, and a full Terabyte of transfer, both of which increase weekly (by 160 MB and 8 GB, respectively). They also give you unlimited domains and MySQL databases, PHP4 and PHP5, Ruby on Rails, and your own Jabber and CVS servers! Excellent for collaborative development projects, and I gotta say, I really like the idea of having my own Jabber server… oh, and they have a 3 month money-back guarantee.

NetFirms

But in the purely cheap hosting arena, I found a new contender in NetFirms, where one of my friends works. Their $9.95 a month hosting offers 20GB of disk space, and 750 GB transfer … and now they include shell access, as well as ruby and python (they also offer to pre-install and configure WordPress as your default web page). Now at $10 a month, I’ve never been that impressed, but I just found out they have a coupon code: 998, which gives you the first year for only $9.98 (yeah, for the whole year, that’s 92% off). Pretty cool, eh? If you think about it, that makes two years less than $120, so it’s like $5 a month, way cheaper than anything else out there!

With all that in mind, I went shopping. I’ll add some more information about other hosts later on, but the bottom line is that BlueHost looks astonishing, with 2 4 GB of disk space, 75 100 GB of Transfer, SSL and even GPG so you can generate certificates, as well as SSH access and the ability to create your own MySQL or PostgreSQL databases. Of course, they also have anonymous FTP, and the ability to create up to 1000 2500 individual POP3 and FTP accounts with their own directories … They have an amazing number of preinstalled scripts: from three different webmail apps (NeoMail, Horde, SquirrelMail) and three statistics packages set up on each subdomain (and on the whole package) (Analog, Webalizer, and Awstats), they even have fantastico set up so you can easily install anything from Mambo (An amazing CMS) (which we’re thinking about using for the church site) to Moodle (which I just set up for Elim Bible Institute) and of course WordPress and Gallery (both of which I use here on this site).

So anyway … I haven’t signed up for an account yet … I’m just wondering if anyone has tried them? I’m basically looking for testimonials (other than those which might be planted out there already). Incidentally, if you have other recommendations, feel free to mention them, but keep in mind the stats on this deal and don’t waste your time on huge descriptions, since I can check out the feature set myself [ ]

Update: 9-Dec-2004

Well, I ended up going with BlueHost for ElimOnline and the moodle install worked perfectly. So far, I’m quite happy with it, no problems whatsoever.

Update: 7-Jun-2005

I just noticed BlueHost has doubled the disk space they offer, so I figured I’d update this post in case anyone finds it while looking for information on hosting companies. I’ve now got several sites hosted with BlueHost, and the only problem I’ve had is one of my “customers” that couldn’t make up their mind if they wanted the free domain or the free domain transfer, and ended up confusing the BlueHost sales guy.