I am looking for a no-frills web hosting company. My current one (whom I've been with for almost 8 years) send out an email that they are shutting down their personal hosting services and focusing on business services. Man, and they were all of $24.95 a year, locked in for life...

Anyway, I see a number of them out there in the $3.50 a month range, but that is for the first year, and then they jump up to something dumb like $6.95 or more a month after that.

I really use it mainly for hosting pictures of stuff. Sure, there are a few outdated webpages there too. No databases, no need for massive space, hundreds of email addresses that I won't use, or unlimited bandwidth.

I could probably just start converting things over to some sort of blog format and go free except for a domain name pointer, but I just don't have the stinking time right now with the basement/theater finishing, graduation for my daughter, the party that goes with it and millions of things that need to be done before then, the family vacation in June, etc...

Any ideas out there?

Use photobucket.com instead. It's free and can hold a slew of pictures.

If you can forego the few webpages and stick to just pics, I'd probably go with Picasaweb (Google's Picasa) over PhotoBucket and the like. I've got both and find Picasa easier to manage, FWIW.

I pay about $100/yr for my Host Papa web hosting, but as you say, it comes with a bunch of stuff that you don't want/need.

Still, it's nice knowing that you own the site/property and you're generally not going to be affected by big policy changes or a site shutdown. It's all a trade-off, right?

The problem would be that most of my photos that I've linked into web forums are hosted at my domain. All of those links would be broken...

I use midphase.com. This plan is $2.95/mo for 3 years with unlimited space and bandwidth.

Does that mean that your best option is to stay with your current provider and convert your "personal" site into a "business" site, paying whatever it is that they're asking, just to maintain existing links? Or will that even happen?

Wow, that's a good deal Peter.

depending on what your needs are Nick, i use finitesite.com they have a personal webhost option that is free... i dont remember off hand how much storage that comes with, but it is good for hosting photos ect, that you might not want to put on photobucket, or what ever....


I have been using finitesite for about 12 years now... i think they have a 50$ option that is suppose to be for life.. You can read about that option if you want. (i'm to lazy to right now )

Oh dear no... No need to convert to business. When I move to a different location, if it is web hosting vs. image storage (Photobucket and the like) my domain name transfers with it and it is sort of like moving. You pack up your stuff, take it to a new house, do a change of address, and done. All of your stuff is there, and because you did a change of address, people know how to find you... You just have a different house to hold you "stuff"...

I will check out midphase and finitesite tonight...

I've always just used the free services.

Finally made the switch on Friday by getting a new hosting location set up and figuring out how to access the management pieces of my domain name. I had trouble because my brother-in-law bought up a few domains like 7 years ago, including mine, as far of a super cheap deal. I had my name, address, email, etc all associated with it if you did a WhoIs looking, however GoDaddy wouldn't let me access it because I guess it was still under his account. Not any longer.

So last night, actually this morning around 5:30 am as I was taking "my shift" in staying up (was up all night already) as a responsible parent with about 12 teenagers crashing at our house (post-post-Prom), I decided to download my entire site and then upload it to the new home. I also changed the settings for my domain so that it pointed to the new hosting. I just confirmed that it seems like the DNS that directs people to the location did get updated, so now it is off to the former hosting site to ask for a pro-rated refund of the remaining time I pre-paid for.

Hopefully things will keep humming along, but some images and such may be lagging until the whole web gets propagated with the new information.

what host did you go with???

I ended up going with WebHostingHub... Might not have been the cheapest, but I managed to lock in 5 years with a special link I had (which has since expired), where most other sites had a 3 year max before jumping up to around $9 a month, so long term it is cheaper than the $2.95/month options for 3 years.