Back in the turn of the century (yeah I’ve been waiting a few years to use that) when I was looking for hosting as more a playground to host my website, I went through probably 100 different company review. At the time I was still mostly an application developer running Linux on a partition on my Dell laptop. So I was looking for a host that offered more than just FTP access to my site. I wanted a host that offered shell/SSH access as well as the ability to compile/install/run my own applications. At the time I was working in C as well as Java, so a host offering Tomcat in addition to Apache was a big plus.

After whittling through the hosting offering at the time. I came across a few that offered dedicated hosting. Well I didn’t want to run a simple site on a $100/month hosting cost. I had to find something else.

Enter WestHost. For almost 8 years I’ve used WestHost.com to host this blog as well as recommend them to friends and clients. The monthly cost is well under $15/month but the product offering is fantastic. On my site I have 10G of disk space and 100G of monthly bandwidth. I have many standard packages that install with a simple click like WordPress, PHP5, MySQL5, Perl, Joomla, Spam software for hosted email. I also have access to the GNU GCC compiler which is standard on my host to compile my own applications. I have unlimited MySQL databases and unlimited email accounts. Unlike MT and others that want an extra $25/month for extra MySQL databases. Better than all this the support team rocks. I rarely have issues but when I do I simply email the support list. Within a few minutes I generally have an answer and solution.

So if your looking for hosting that offer more flexibility for the right price check out WestHost.com.