It seems every few years we swap hosting recommendations. Based on a conversation a few years ago on this list, I chose Siteground and have been reasonably happy with it, at least until recently. Of course a good host depends on your needs. Shared hosting has worked pretty well for me for my modest needs but I have used virtual private servers in the past. In general, hosts seem to have upped their game with shared hosting and I rarely encounter performance issues that I saw in the past. One of the big trends, which is affecting hosts like GoDaddy and Siteground, is they are becoming virtual web hosts. GoDaddy is moving to Amazon's cloud and Siteground to Google's. So presumably these hosts are saving a lot of money because they aren't maintaining their own server rooms. It's generally complicated to set up hosting in the cloud, so they seem to add value by putting up pretty interfaces. Siteground had impressed me with its all solid state infrastructure, but presumably all the major cloud vendors are now solid state and since Siteground is virtual now (or moving that way), it's not that big of a deal. So looking at informed recommendations for shared and VPS web hosts in particular. I'm a little prejudiced against virtual hosts, but I'm guessing it's a trend that will only continue and at some point virtually all web hosts will be virtual. I prefer hosts that build in value. Siteground, for example, includes free Let's Encrypt certificates and their maintenance built in. This seems to be becoming more standardized but curiously last I checked GoDaddy doesn't do this. I attended a podcamp in Boston last year. A representative from Dreamhost talked about how they fought off legal efforts by the Trump administration to make them monitor their servers proactively. I don't think they are a virtual hosting company. Anyone have experiences with Dreamhost? I do have one recommendation when it comes to registrars. I keep my registrar separate from my hosting so I can quickly divorce hosts when needed. I see registrars as commodities. I've been happy with namesilo.com. They seem to be the cheapest out there and they throw in extras, like privacy protection, for free. Most of my clients use GoDaddy and I think their registrar services are obscenely priced. But I'm sure registrars are going through changes too. It might be good to trade notes on registrars too. Thanks and I'm sure our discussion will be useful to many. Mark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20201210/956bbca9/attachment.html>