Recommended Hosting services

Following many requests, we have now decided to list our recommended hosts below. We have often switched to these hosts from other services. We hope you find this information useful. Please note that the detailed information below (particularly for Site5.com) may go out of date at any moment, so check the hosting services themselves for current hosting plan features and prices. We have quoted the hosting price for a year's hosting. This means you pay the whole year's hosting fee upfront to get this price.

1. No-hassle single site hosting

We use Godaddy to host hostingbreak.com. We have found them to be fast, reliable and easy to use.

Cost: About $48/year Economy Plan, more for higher space and bandwidth
Web Space: 10GB
Bandwidth: 300GB
Platforms: Windows or Linux
Extras: Good support, 100 email accounts, MySQL, forums and blogging, Adwords credit, integrated Google Webmaster tools
Forum? No.
Brutal Honesty: The hosting interface is well designed and easy to use. The single drawback with Godaddy hosting is the limited stats they provide; however, you can add better stats for about $3 a month, or add a tracker from one of the free stats sites like Addfreestats.com.
Check them out:

2. Multisite Hosting

Multisite hosting means you pay one fee but can host a large number of different domain names. Most people who are making a living online use services like this, as the cost of individual hosting plans for each of their sites would too high (if they have dozens or even hundreds of sites). They offer a single interface ('Backstage') for adding new sites and so on, and another ('Netadmin') for managing your individual domains.

Site5.com

We use Site5.com for many of our commercial sites. Their plans change all the time, but the figures below are correct at time of writing.

Cost: $102/year for 'unlimited' websites
Web Space: 1500GB
Bandwidth: 15TB
Extras: Frontpage, SSL, subdomains, MySQL, Uptime guarantee, Reseller plans
Forum: Yes, very active.
Brutal Honesty: We like their site maintenance tools Backstage and NetAdmin, but they do have a learning curve. As with any shared hosting, the speed and reliability you get for your sites depends partly on how many other customers are put on the same server, and what they are doing with their pages and scripts. Site5 have been around for years, and serve our sites reliably, at the moment. Their uptime and speed may not match more expensive single-site hosting services. Read their forum to get a feel for their service.
Check them out: Go to Site5

3. Other hosting services to consider:

Omnis Network - An extremely popular hosting company which offers large amounts of storage and transfer, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee, for $83.40 a year. Comes with shopping carts, blog, forum and gallery software, good stats, Perl, PHP and MySQL.