Any monthly web hosting companies?

[xpalm]

First, I am searching for a hosting company that bills monthly. I don't want to pay yearly and get stuck with a company.

Stumbled on chime host - http://www.chimehost.com but I can't seem to find many sites advertising them. I see justhost on comparison sites but they require yearly payment for the low price.

so who do you recommend?

[SpykStorm]

http://000webhost.com offers monthly and yealy plans, and have unlimited plans also.

Edit. Hmm, I can't find their paid plans anymore, I guess they stopped offering them. http://byethost.com also offers monthly hosting.

[xpalm]

i tried to search for 000webhost and saw a post talking about how that company is fraud - http://drupal.org/node/618912

[Dark Knight]

Dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com/) when Gerudo and I used it was pretty decent. The lowest plan cost around $9 a month and offered an astonishing amount of storage space and bandwidth (both increased by a specific amount each month). You might want to research them. They gave us no issues when we used them but I cannot really say anything about how they run things now.

[AtmaWeapon]

At a much larger forum I go to, there are three large web hosts that have hundreds of customers and good comments.

I use Apis Networks (http://apisnetworks.com/) and have absolutely no complaints. On the rare occasion I go to the support forums I get a response within 24 hours; I can't remember exactly how fast because I've only really ever posted 2 "I can't figure out how to do X" posts. They appealed to me more than the other two big ones because when I posted in the thread they had on the large forum an employee spent a pretty long PM conversation with me helping me set up my account and transfer my domain.

I've heard good things about Dreamhost (as suggested by Dark Knight) for small sites; I've heard if you have a larger site on a cheaper plan they can be dicks about closing your site early and demanding that you upgrade to a higher plan. My guess is they lump a million of the cheap plans on one server and if one is more busy than "random dude's blog" it can adversely affect the others. That's their problem, not yours.

I hear good things about HostGator (http://www.hostgator.com/) as well. It also offers UNLIMITED everything for half the price of Dreamhost.

I don't trust anyone that offers me UNLIMITED everything for cheap, and it's pretty common that UNLIMITED usually means "we have arbitrary limits on how much you can consume before we enact our arbitrary 'if your site is causing undue burden...' clause of your user agreement." I saw lots of people jump on Dreamhost to use the UNLIMITED everything to host/download torrents from their server. "Torrents" was never mentioned in the "we're closing your site until the end of the month" emails, it was always "you are using too much bandwidth". How do you use too much when you have UNLIMITED? "Too much" was never defined. When I compare the cheap plans to more expensive plans on Dreamhost and HostGator, I see very little difference. Probably the hidden part of their feature matrix is "how much bandwidth you can use before we harass you".

If you're looking for affordable hosting and your site is pretty modest, I think you should pick between those three. Do some searches and look for reviews, and pick whoever seems to have the best value. If you think your site is going to be pretty popular, I'd be wary of offers of UNLIMITED everything. Email them and ask them what their criteria for "too much" is on the unlimited plan. If they respond "there is no too much", ask them what happens if you pick the el cheapo plan and run your very own version of RapidShare and consume 10GB/hour while keeping CPU load around 75%. If they respond "we'll do nothing" they're liars, find another host. If they don't respond, they're partially honest because they don't want to admit that UNLIMITED has a cap. If they respond with "well... we'd shut that down and ask you to be more reasonable" then hey, at least they're honest. If they tell you the caps they're saints and you should sign up immediately.

Avoid GreatValueHost like it's a plague. (http://greatvaluehost.com/) Long ago, they were known as Fuitadnet. I believe they hosted AGN for a while, and they hosted my site for years. One time half their sites got cracked for some reason or another and everyone lost two weeks of data. So within a few months they raised their rates to cover nightly backups; this seemed reasonable so I stuck with them. Then a couple of years ago they managed to lose an entire disk array on a server; everyone's data was gone. No sweat right? They had nightly backups right? Well... this revealed that they weren't really doing them. But they didn't own up. After giving them a couple of weeks to do an automated restore, I posted on the forums asking where my backup was. Crickets. So I went to the other threads about it and asked. Crickets. A few VIP customers reported getting a months-old restore. So I asked why the restores were months-old if we were paying extra for nightly backups. Thread locked. So, in another thread, I quoted the rate increase email and demanded that Fuitadnet either restore my site from the backup or refund the rate increases they'd charged me. A lot of people agreed. The next day, their entire support forums were deleted and removed from the site. That told me all I needed to know, and I moved. I have no reason to believe that GreatValueHost is better. As far as I can tell, it's the same people but they changed their name because Fuitadnet had such a bad reputation.

[Gerudo]

http://www.bluehost.com/

this is one i thought about while my dreamhost account was on the downway out. it looks pretty decent.

[Nicholas Steel]

http://www.tweakguides.com/Hosting.html