Recommendations & Experiences WRT Web Hosting?

[Coyote]

I've been talking about it and delaying it for a long time, but I'm thinking about doing my webcomic with attached forum and information wiki.

Who here knows or has any experience with good reliable (and affordable) webhosting sites that are reliable and can support such a thing? I'm a beginner at this sort of thing but adapt fairly quickly; I'm also not averse to going to a group webcomic type site and subletting from them to see if my ideas are popular enough for self-support.

My plan is a webcomic, possibly monthly or bi-monthly, with chapters about 6 pages or so at a time of a science-fiction action & drama series. I've posted pictures and short stories on SDN before, and tried playing a sample faction in SDNW4 before my workplace slammed the door on unauthorized web activity.

So any advice, insight, warnings or tricks of the trade would be awesome. Thanks in advance!

[Pu-239]

It looks like shared hosting is sufficient for this. I'm not really familiar w/ shared hosting (generally like the control that a VPS offers). Pair networks and godaddy seem to be popular or at least well-known providers. You probably can find cheaper hosts elsewhere though, w/ varying levels of reliability.

I'm currently renting a unmanaged VPSlink for 8$/month and should have some free space available for use, although I'm looking to get rid of it since the only thing running on it is my personal` jabber gateway and personal image hosting, which can be done on any old used machine at home for free.

[Skgoa]

My site is hosted by icdsoft, I did not have any problems, yet. And they are actually hosting it (and my .com domain) for free for 12 months, since a had a coupon. We still have a stack of those in the office. I am going to take another one home today and see if there is a restriction on which country you have to live in, if anyone is interested.

[Coyote]

GoDaddy is very much in the public eye these days, it seems, and they are "the most expensive of the cheap ones" --if that makes sense. Anyone have a lot of experience with them? They're about $10-$11 thereabouts.

[Eleas]

GoDaddy is very much in the public eye these days, it seems, and they are "the most expensive of the cheap ones" --if that makes sense. Anyone have a lot of experience with them? They're about $10-$11 thereabouts.

I use GoDaddy as a DNS service, not for web storage. The service is very nice, but if you decide to use it, you really do need to go through everything you click during the registration with a fine-toothed comb. They're going to post huge splashes of things that look relevant, but are basically just ads, followed by a small innocuous link to the stuff you actually wanted.

[Coyote]

For low traffic, I could probably just host you on my server for free*. It doesn't sound like anything terribly big.

Hmmm, I may well consider that. Thanks!

I am starting out with black-and-white scanned images. It'll probably be awhile before I'm comfortable with color. I'm old-school.

[Ariphaos]

Mooching off a friend's space is often the best way to go. I only run dedicated Debian servers with no control panel at this point, so I can't offer much unless you already know your stuff. I run a set of extremely high load sites on very little hardware, so stuff like control panels and other garbage just gets in the way.

Dreamhost tends to offer "buy one month get eleven months free" deals. I did that because some of my clients use Dreamhost, and they have a rather robust setup for their price, unlike Godaddy. Still will probably drop that when the year is up, though, I've no real need for them. They tend to sell ~150/server, last I checked, while some of the worst oversellers were doing 750 or more per server.

Godaddy is a marketing engine, Namecheap's domains are cheaper and they have their own free DNS service, which goes down more than DNS Made Easy does but is good enough for stuff that isn't absolutely critical. I've been Godaddy-clean for the better part of a year now, and my wallet thanks me.