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As a web designer, I get asked daily for web hosting recommendations. While there are literally thousands of web hosting companies that provide excellent service, great uptime and have knowledgeable tech support, I have compiled a list of 13 hosting companies that either I use personally, have clients using or trusted associates recommend. These are companies I recommend if you are looking for hosting for your blog, small to medium size business site, online store or community. Most of these sites feature two things - cPanel and Fantastico - both of which are requirements for ease of use in my book. cPanel is easy to navigate and loaded with features allowing you to easily check stats, set up email, create database, password protect directories, and more. Fantastico offers the fastest and most straight forward installs for more than 20 of our favorite Open Source programs and scripts like WordPress, phpBB, ZenCart, Galleries, and other utilities. For the average website owner or blogger, these features cut down on a lot of tech support/webmaster support time. In alphabetical order the web hosting companies I recommend are:  Based out of Atlanta, GA, A Small Orange provides both shared hosting and virtual private servers. They advertise no limit hosting, cPanel, multiple stats packages, Fantastico and advanced email options.
 Blogs About Hosting is the hosting service of E Webscapes which is owned by WordPress for Dummies author Lisa Sabin Wilson. Affordable, reliable and an owner who “gets it” when it comes to the specific needs of blogs, makes Blogs About Hosting a great option. (Disclosure - I do design work for E Webscapes in addition to my freelance work)
 Dreamhost has their own web-based control panel and while they don’t offer Fantastico, Dreamhost does offer 13 of the most common scripts (such as WordPress) as part of their one click installation feature.
 EasyCGI.com is a lot like Dreamhost in that they have their own control panel and their own library of one-click install scripts. They offer Shared Web hosting plans to fit any budget as well as Virtual Dedicated/Private Servers (VPS). Their Data Center and Co-location facilities boast Dell PowerEdge servers with backup and redundancy.
 GoDaddy is my personal choice for domain name purchasing/registration but I do have clients who love GoDaddy’s web hosting, too. They don’t have Fantastico, but do have their own version of it called Hosting Connection which gives site owners access to a variety of one click script installations. They provide shared hosting, virtual dedicated servers and dedicated server plans.
 HostGator is my personal choice for web hosting. They have been doing a great job of hosting 30+ web sites for myself and my clients for the past two years. HostGator is very affordable, offers cPanel and Fantastico, and has had amazing uptime!
 HostMonster is another popular choice for affordable web hosting. They allow you to host unlimited domains on one account which is great for owners of multiple web sites. Fantastico and cPanel are included, and you can get $50 of PPC credit for both Yahoo and Google with your account.
 HostRocket offers unlimited bandwidth, 1,000+ GB of RAID protected storage space, cPanel and Fantastico, 10 websites per account plus add a new site every month, and $50 Yahoo search credit.
 I have been a customer of Jumpline since their first year in business - 1997 to be exact - and currently have about 15 client websites hosted with them (some of them have been hosted there since 1997). Jumpline’s uptime has been close to FLAWLESS, the tech support is knowledgeable and helpful, and they have been very stable. They do offer ValueApps - their own library of scripts - but it is not as intuitive as Fantastico.
 Do you have a high-traffic site that needs scalable, high end web hosting solutions? If so, MediaTemple is my first choice! Powerful grid service replaces shared hosting and the dedicated physical virtual servers in their Nitro program run on quad core processors.
 midPhase Hosting has a variety of hosting options from the budget to very advanced, dedicated server plans, and credit card processing. MidPhase offers cPanel and Fantastico on some of their plans, but not all, so read the descriptions closely.
 Mosso is another service for sites that need instant scalability like a popular blog (that regularly gets Digg front page traffic), a large e-commerce site or 20 medium sites under one account. Mosso uses cloud technology which is basically instant, easy access to large scale computing.
 Site5, a great solution for eCommerce, Blogs or Ruby on Rails sites, is co-located with The Planet. Site5 uses extremely high-end servers and doesn’t crowd them. Additionally, they handle their own tech support and offer a 60-day money back guarantee.
I hope this is a helpful resource. I’d love to get your thoughts and recommendations as well.
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