Affordable Web Hosting

Before I get in to the rest of this posting, let me say that although I'm a user of the hosting company I discuss below, I'm not affiliated with them. It makes no difference to me whether you sign-up with them or not.

There are many web hosting companies out there. Many are good, most are not worth being considered. And a few are great. I've been using one particular company, CrystalTech, for many years now and they've always stood out from all the others.

CrystalTech supports many web development languages such as ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, and ColdFusion. Noticeably absent is JSP which is the one strike against the company that I can think of. Perhaps there is some technical reason for not supporting JSP, but I don't know what that is.

CrystalTech also provides several affordable web hosting plans to suit the needs of owners of even the smallest sites. At the bottom there is a $2.95/month plan for developers to use when creating a site. Of course, you don't have to be developer to sign-up for this kind of plan. A relative of mine uses such a plan for a new blog he's putting together. No need to pay high monthly fees when a site isn't even available to the public yet. Even the next step up at $7.95/month is still inexpensive. If you want to use a database, that'll bring the price up to $16.95/month. Still not bad compared to some other hosting companies.

Beyond the technical aspects, CrystalTech also has good service. Sure, a site may go down once or twice a year, but CrystalTech responds to such downages by sending you an e-mail indicating a problem has been detected and then sending another e-mail when the problem has been corrected. This notification system is much better than constantly checking in to see how things are going. Also, if you e-mail a question to the support team, you will very likely get a response the same day.