What are good choice to select for a web hosting services? And what have been your experiences with it? And does the geographic localization matter?

I don't want free sites with limitations. I am looking for a good hosting service with capacity of 5gbs+. So far the only I have took a look is: http://www.godaddy.com/ but I would like to see what others has to say and what other options are out there to choice.

Thanks in advance for any information!

If you're in the US, ask Gand XD maybe you guys can work something out, lol

First off, the location argument:

Location may or may not be a factor. If your webhost is in a decent datacenter (where the actual server is parked and how wide of an internet connection it has to the rest of the world), it shouldn't matter if it's located next door or on the opposite side of the country. Going out of country might change things a bit, but, once again, given it's in a good datacenter it shouldn't take too much of a toll on your bandwidth. This is also a double edged sword, because the reverse is also true.

The best choice for this is to choose something in a major city that isn't known for act-of-God damage in the country you're located in. Those usually have high internet connection speeds for any location and minimal downtime.


For hosts, I'm a bit less helpful:

Godaddy may hit everything you like, but they're known for heavy advertising and for being locked down on features, and they often have downtime. Dreamhost is better in the fact that it has less advertising, but they're still locked down as to what you can do with them. There are ways around these lockdowns, but they're quite hard to implement and, most times, violate the TOS.

1&1 is expensive, but you're allowed to do more (and they give you a cpanel to work with). On the cheaper side of things, bluehost is the most flexible and stable of the webhosts, but you can't have any form of swearing on their servers (read ther TOS), and their staff have full rights to review any data on your site (read: no privacy).

There's two VPSes (these are not webhosts, but can preform the same as a webhost and more) that I'd recommend, but they require you to have a lot of server knowledge to get up and going; but you can do ANYTHING on them. Slicehost offers high support and maximum uptime, but costs a lot of money. Linode (the one I personally use) is cheaper than Slicehost, but their support is almost non-existent.

Ultimately, it's a balancing act of cost to feature to stability to presentation to support. There isn't a single host that does all of these "well". One bit of advice is to take advantage of trials (most listed come with one month no-hassle demos), find out which one fits what you like (weigh in the above three factors), and then stick with them. Another thing is that you should buy your domain from a separate vendor from your host. If you do not, and you decide to let your website kick the bucket, your domain name is locked into the dead account, rendering it unusable (this happened with the DNS ichigossheetmusic.com domain name and is why we're now called simply Ichigos).

Out of all of these that I've listed, I've had Bluehost and Linode. I've hosted wordpress, textpattern, catalyst-based homebrew, opengoo, redmine, twiki, dokuwiki, Drupal, Joomla, shimmie2, (*takes breath*) and SMF websites on both of these two systems, and I have to say that both of them worked for what I needed of them for and quite well. I didn't like the holy war of "no swearing and no privacy" that bluehost had, so I decided to switch over to Linode. But I'm also in the computer science field, and topics involving servers come easier to me than others, so my opinion might be slanted towards the techie side of things.

Thank you for the elaborated reply! It's very helpful.

The hosting will be for my professional graphic design portfolio that I will be working in the next weeks.

If you haven't chosen one yet, I've been using bihira a few years now, and they've been good to me. Pretty cheap, no downtime I've seen, and their service is fast and good. I'd check them out, at least.

You could also try using a program called Apache to host your own server; provided of course you have another computer that can be on 24/7.

In the end it's probably cheaper and easier to just rent some webspace.

By the way, if you have windows XP Pro or Vista Business/Ultimate, you have Internet Information Services which does the same as Apache.

You could also try using a program called Apache to host your own server; provided of course you have another computer that can be on 24/7.

Three problems:

Most broadband connections have a horrendously slow up-pipe.
Hosting a website often violates the TOS of consumer ISPs. If you do this, read the TOS very carefully.
The overall exchange of cost of self-hosting is not really a saving any money. For a normal consumer, it costs somewhere around 2,000 USD (Dual T1, and rig) a month to get a server setup similar to what other hosts give.

M, your last point makes no sense XD If I plan to run one website, I can do it using an old Pentium 233 if I want to. As long as I'm not hosting something big that should be fine, you certainly don't need an expensive server setup for that. You also don't need something similar to what a hosting provider gives you because you simply won't attract as much traffic as hosting providers generally do.

I'm was trying to say that you get your money's worth from a webhost/VPS. Even at 120 USD a year, the cost of purchasing something on your own that's equivalent to the host would pay for the webhost for just over 16 years.

I pay about 10 euros (10.000 dollars) per year for my webhosting. If I hosted it myself that'd cost me that amount of money per month just to pay electricity. But I could use an old computer if I wanted to, wouldn't cost me a cent.

So hosting at home would only cost me some effort and some money for electricity, but getting professional hosting it costs me even less money. Not sure what I'm trying to say. You're making it sound too expensive to host stuff at home. You could host it from a budget laptop that's worth 150 dollars/100 euros.