So I wanted to host a website with my own custom domain name. There are many options out there, with “unlimited bandwidth”, “unlimited space”, “one-click Wordpress install!”, “Joomla templates”, etc, etc. However all I really wanted want a basic web server and domain with the basic functions:

  • ssh access
  • subdomination creation
  • abilty to alias and redirect urls

Also, I wasn’t looking to pay a lot since I only need the bare minimum at this time.

Options

Some of the main options I looked at were:

  • Dreamhost
  • Bluehost
  • Hostgator
  • Asmallorage

Out of all of these, A Small Orange seemed to have the best price point for what I needed, and I liked that they are a smaller company and have good customer service.

A Small Orange

I paid $50 for a shared server, 500M of space, and a domain name for a year. So far I am happy with them, the customer support has been great so far. The “Cpanel” interface isn’t that great, but it’s functional and gets the job done. So far I have just set up the jasonrhaas.com and blog.jasonrhaas.com domains. The blog domain is built using the Jekyll blog builder, and the main domain is just bootstrap.