Anyone know of a site that ranks website hosting vendors? Looking for a vendor to host a friend's site, but there seems to be a never ending list of them. Just looking for a good value, coupled with great reliability.

There are A LOT of sites that rank hosting companies, but most of them get money for referring visitors. You probably won't find the best results looking at them. However, I reccommend the forums at http://webhostingtalk.com/ , they have lots of reviews posted by actual customers of hosting companies. Just use the search function and you can probably find what you're looking for. ----- Website promotion guide

Thanks for the info. Thats why I asked here. I Googled for host rankings, and it returned hundreds of pages that all had completely contradictory rankings.

The site linked to above is one of the more reliable ones... I'm sure there are many good, reputable hosts out there, but as someone who has tried several and gotten burned more than once, let me make some suggestions: 1. Know what platform you want to develop on. If you want to use PHP or Perl, look for a unix-based host (usually some flavor of linux). If you want to use asp or .NET, look for a windows host. I am well aware that there are windows versions of PHP and Perl for windows and even versions of asp for Unix, but in my experience, these can really be troublesome when you want complicated scripts. If all you want to do is serve static HTML files, any host will work fine, but I personally prefer the linux ones for their uptime. I use linux for my "side jobs" and windows for my real job, so I've been around the block with both. 2. DON'T REGISTER YOUR DOMAIN WITH YOUR WEB HOST! Use godaddy.com, registerfly.com, dotster.com, etc to get your own domain name in your name. Point it to the web host. You spend more and get less when you buy the two together. Don't even do it if the host gives it to you for free. You always want to be the only one in control of your domain name. 3. Get a host with a 30 day money back guarantee. You'll want to see how fast the pages actually come up, how reliable the e-mail is, how fast you get tech-support when you e-mail a problem, etc. There are too many with a 30-day guarantee to go with one without. 4. To quote anonproxy...Hosting is cheaper than food. Unless you want something special, you probably should pay less than $10 per month for one small site. 5. Personally, I use hostforweb.com. They are absolutely fantastic and I will never, ever leave. Their servers are almost always up, their control panel features are out of this world, and I get responses to my tech-support e-mails within 5 minutes. I don't think I've ever had a tech support issue that wasn't resolved within an hour. I host several sites, so I purchased the reseller plan for $25/month. powweb.com also seems to be pretty reputable. Although I have never personally used it, it is very cheap for lots of great features. For windows, many people seem to like gearhost.com. I tried it for the 30 days and about killed myself trying to get support, e-mail, et al. To be fair, I was running complex perl scripts and activeperl just didn't cut it. -SN

Good link. I got lucky with my hosts, used tophost.com to find them within budget, and they turned out to be one of the friendliest and most reliable, in my view. But yes, users' recommendations are critical, gets rid of all the sales hype the companies try to pull. Again, my hosts were honest when I asked some crucial questions about downtime, etc, but then with their own user forums, they can't afford to get caught out telling a lie.

I highly recommend this web host: iPowerWeb Web Hosting Their support has been getting a lot better in the past years. They offer: 800MB Webspace 40GB Bandwidth 400 POP Emails MySQL, PHP, SSI, SSL, CGI, Perl & more. for $7.95/month

ipowerweb is one of the most not liked hosts on webhostingtalk.com, so I would not recomend it, I also wouldnt because im a host ;) thehostreport.com is not influanced in any way, no paid rankings or anything like that I recomend myself if you do not need 2/47 support :-P aim: excellsupport msn: chaudharymic@hotmail.com email: webmaster@excellhosting.net http://excellhosting.net for all your hosting needs.