Today’s fiasco with my web host — which I won’t go into detail about but resulted in several hours of downtime — has prompted me to begin searching for a larger, more reliable partner. There are hundreds of web hosts to filter through and lots of “review” websites that are, in all likelihood, paid off or supported by one particular host. It seems every hosting company claims to be “the best” by some measurement. I want your input. Here are my requirements

Required Requirements

• 99.x% up-time as rated by something independent. Pretty much any host company that is at all serious falls into this category — if they don’t, stay away
• Has cPanel
• I require at least 1GB space with 5GB/mo transfer
• I require the ability to host up to 10 different domains/websites. I don’t care if they are in a reseller account or not
• PHP 5.0, Apache, MySQL, Linux

Preferred Requirements

• I have been looking into “green” or “carbon neutral” web hosts and I love the idea
• Around $100 per year. I can go up to $200 per year if neccessary
• I would prefer a hosting company that owns the datacenter and the servers. I would like to stay away from co-location or virtual web hosts if at all possible
• I want a phone number I can call if something goes wrong