So here's my issue. Right now, most of my sites are being hosted by Bluehost. Right now, I'm generating between 20-25K page views a month on pretty plain Wordpress sites - mostly text with some pictures. I'm fairly happy with Bluehost aside from the recent outage - I've always gotten good service from them. However, I'm launching a new web project that I hope will hit the big time, as in generating 1 million+ page views a month by 2012. Now my plan with Bluehost says it's "unlimited," but I have a hard time believing that they'll allow me to be paying just a few bucks a month on a site pushing that much traffic. Does anyone knows what happens if my site blows up? Do they shut it down and ask me to pay up? So I'm wondering, can anyone recommend a good web host that will allow me to start small and scale up to dedicated servers later on if I need them?
Best thing you can do is start off with shared hosting and once the traffic starts to grow too big for a shared environment move to a VPS, best type of VPS would be a cloud VPS, since you can scale those after you purchase them as much as you wish depending on your needs, such a service is provided by vps.net But my opinion is not to go on VPS before your traffic starts to come in heavy cause it would be a waste of resources and money. The company I work for, HetrixByte.COM doesn't sell VPS or dedicated servers, but we do offer shared & reseller hosting services and you can start your site on one of our hosting packages, and when the time comes you could move to a scalable cloud VPS.
My company sells VPS's at low prices, starting at $6. We can scale them up, whenever you need it... higher than most dedicated servers. Refer to sig.
I suppose you need to let us know first of all your web hosting requirements. That is the must when yoiu are seeking for any web hosting solution.
Just a clarification: I don't know jack sh*t about managing a dedicated server or anything like that, and I don't want to know. I just want something idiot-proof and reliable that can scale up should I start hitting the limits of what a shared-hosting plan can handle. That's it. I'm willing to pay up a little bit for now.
Okay, well you want a Virtual Server or a Dedicated Server that is managed. Than you can just throw your website up and let the host handle everything else. A lot of companies offer this at reasonable prices. mine starts at $15 per month + the server and any software you want included. Look around, there is a lot of options available for this sort of thing.
If that is possible try to test all possible web hosts? If so please do that. I think that will help you to understand which one is bad and which is not.
My sites are also hosting with Bluehost. This is one of great hosting company. I feel happy with Bluehost until Aug' 2010. Now bluehost uptime is come to average and many time tells in their status page: "Kernel security upgrades" ... "security patch upgrade" "Kernel security upgrades from this weekend appear to be causing apache to be unstable resulting in sporadic connectivity issues. Admins are working to resolve." (this message appeared on 2010-09-20 09:39:42 ) Anybody with me? or me only alone?
Updated: I found a website http://sameip.org/ to "Find all Sites/Website/Domains on the same IP address" and I tried my site ipaddress...oh...nearly.. 180 sites hosted on the same IP Address as mine and checked other sites also down now. Dear Bluehost members, sorry to mistaken me.. this is the current status of bluehost. I hope they will find a permanent solution for this downtime and make their clients happy.
BlogsAboutCrap: Since you have been satisfied with BlueHost, have you checked with them a upgrade path to Fully Managed VPS / Dedicated Server? If your site is utilizing high resources, BlueHost will not attempt to suspend you, but limit you on the CPU resources by their own developed in-house software, you may lost some traffic but not all. If they have CPU viewer in their cPanel, you can gauge how much CPU % you are using, that will allow you some planning what you intend to do before it actually hits the CPU limit.