Web hosting

[liv]

A couple of years ago, I signed up for hosting with a company which turned out to be a front for TalkActive, based on clicking through a Facebook ad and seeing that it was cheap and met the basic requirements I had. Their banner proclaimed 10:- a month (about 80p), and there were a few hidden costs but it still worked out pretty cheap compared to anything else I could find easily. However, recently they have put the prices up and become rather unreliable.

So I want to move, but not urgently.

Ability to deal with my domains, which are .se and .be (the latter domain is registered with G and I, but I'm happy to transfer it if that's cheaper or easier.)

Some kind of email; forwarding is basically fine, I don't necessarily need a mailbox, but I do need to be able to define at least a handful of different email addresses at each domain

FTP access preferably, though I'll live with a web interface if I have to

Minimal storage space, but bandwidth limits such that I don't need to count every kilobyte in trepidation

Minimal scripting; my pages are pretty much HTML, CSS and a little tiny bit of JavaScript, so I'm not desperate for PHP or Apache or anything like that, and I'm not intending to host my own blog any time soon

User-friendly, uncomplicated interface; I just want to upload web pages, not configure servers

Low cost; I'm prepared to pay for decent web hosting, but not more than a few tens of pounds per year including domain registration.

Ability to accept payment by Swedish bank card (I'll check this one out for myself, I don't expect people to know about that little detail)

No adverts displayed on my web pages (I don't mind if I have to look at adverts in order to interact with the hosting company or control panel)

Some stats would be nice, but not a dealbreaker as I'll use Google Analytics anyway.

I'm not expecting fantastic reliability in this price range, but at least some page where I can look for notices of downtime and get information, and given several similar options reliability would be the deciding factor

Any suggestions? Basically I'm looking for cheap, off-the-shelf hosting and I think my requirements are fairly modest. And yes, I could Google but then I'll end up in the same situation I did last time, just picking something that looks ok without any knowledge. So I'm hoping that some of you will have experience and feel like making recommendations.

(Yes, I do get some hosting from my ISP, no, I'd rather not use it, because it's all style and no substance and I'm likely to be moving in a couple of months anyway.)

Comments

[hatam_soferet]

Well, I use hostexcellence, who have US and UK divisions, and they are Not Very Excellent At All. Why not email Gerv? He's likely to know.

[pseudomonas]

I use tagadab, who seem OK after a few months, but that's virtual-server rather than web-hosting.

[mongoose]

I use www.123-reg.co.uk, and I find them pretty reliable.

NearlyFreeSpeech.Net

[pne]

I like NearlyFreeSpeech.net, who do PAYG web-hosting -- so you only pay for the storage and bandwidth that you use. I pay about a US dollar a month that way right now, and part of that is 1 cent/day for MySQL, which it sounds like you wouldn't need, and 1 cent/day for private domain registration, which you wouldn't need if you already have your domain registered elsewhere.

I believe they host just about any domain as long as you have name servers; they'll also do DNS hosting for you (for free) as long as the ccTLD will let them (for example, .de doesn't like NFSN's setup since it wants the two name servers to be in separate IP networks, which is the case but which is not readily visible from the IP addresses), and will even let you register some domains through them (but only .com .net .org .biz .info .name).

They also do email forwarding (for an additional charge; 1 cent/day IIRC).

No ads on users' pages.

They accept payment by credit card, PayPal, cheque, or money order.

[green_knight]

I've just signed up with https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ which was recommended by esmeraldus. As far as I can make out, they're competent and reputable.

voilà.

[jpallan.livejournal.com]

I want to go all Lorem Ipsum, but I can't think of anything random.

[siderea]

I rather like AcornHost.com for my modest needs; I don't know if they do .se and .be, but I can ask on your behalf if you'd like. They allow sftp (though I haven't used it) and their web control panel is very slick.