It’s always a challenge searching for a web host. Most people aren’t even sure of what they need anymore. One of the issues I’m coming across during my search is cost, space, and bandwidth.
I want to find a good host with a good cost and reliability, but I also want to have access to great features. The hosts that are rated up at the top for never being down and what not don’t give out much space and don’t give out much bandwidth. Most people will never need more than 2 GB of space or 100 GB of bandwidth, but many hosts are spitting out large numbers such as 200 GB space (and more) or 1.5 TB bandwidth (or more). Of course no one will really need that much space or bandwidth unless their site is super popular, but still it’s comforting seeing that offered.
My issue is I have a site that needs about 1 GB of space, and the next webProject I’m working on will need at 2 GB of space and more as it grows. The problem is I want the reliability of the hosts that are highly revered, but only sell packages with 10 MB – 1 GB space. I’ve never really hit over 20 GB of bandwidth, so I don’t see an issue when search there.
mediaTemple is generous with space and bandwidth, but I’d prefer if they allowed for more MySQL Users and their speed is also an issue.
webFaction is generous and looks great from all aspects, but I’d prefer if PHP was run under my user instead of apache so I don’t have to worry about something being executed by another user’s script on the machine corrupting files that I allowed apache to have access to… That way I can only corrupt my own files as well.
So it’s currently a battle between webFaction and mediaTemple. When I get my paycheck, I might retry webFaction and see how thigns work out there. It’ll probably take some getting used to, but they do seem better than mediaTemple.

What I like about mediaTemple:
- Full control over DNS, but webFaction has that too.
- Somewhat easy to use controlPanel, but webFaction has a better one.
- Ability to survive high traffic loads, but they’ll charge you extra if you exceed your GPU allocation and not shut down your site. I’d prefer my site be shut down and have to option to pay to open it because being charged $0.10 per GPU over. I’ve heard horror stories about this, but mt claims 99.7% of sites will never have a problem of going over.

If cPanel allowed for full control over DNS and some other stuff, then 99.8% of hosts would probably suit my needs, but webFaction, mediaTemple, sliceHost and dreamHost seem to fit the needs at the moment. slieceHost and dreamHost cost too much to setup, mediaTemple is too slow, and webFaction has some settings I don’t like. If only VPS’s and Dedicateds were cheaper.