Ok, you’ve got a nifty idea for a site, maybe it’s personal stuff, maybe it’s something more involved. You could put it up on that free space your ISP gives you. And then you get to hassle with it every time you have to change ISP’s because Comcast gets bought by TimeWarner, that decides to bail out of your area leaving it to verizon, which…. you get the picture.

Or, you can plunk down a few bucks a year, buy a domain name and then plunk down a few more bucks a month and buy some space on a professional hosting company. That way, the domain is yours and it won’t change just because some bean counters at your ISP decide your city no longer forecasts to good market saturation, or whatever the jargon is. It also means an email address that won’t change just because you ditch cable and switch to Dish Network (say that five times fast!).

There’s a lot of hosting companies out there, and everyone has different requirements and demands as to what a good hosting company consists of. In my case, I wanted a host that would provide a decent amount of space, tons of email support, MS SQL and MySQL options, as well as Access dbs, and full support for .NET and some of the more esoteric web languages out there, like PHP, Ruby, Python, etc. so I could experiment with them, time permitting.

www.1and1.com looked pretty good, the price is definitely right, but they make you choose between Windows hosting, with .NET support and Linux hosting, with all the other languages. Not so good. But their domain registration is excellent and they provide free private DNS records, which is quite nice.

I ended up stumbling upon www.servergrid.com. They support all my requirements for 7.95$ a month, and they use HSphere for dynamic site management, which seems to work pretty good for me. I can host all my domains through one account, and just split my space up between them, which makes managing everything nice and tidy. Granted, I’m only running small sites, testing web apps, etc so I don’t have huge demands, and your mileage may vary.

This site uses dasBlog for its content management. I had it installed, setup and running within an hour on my ServerGrid space (not including the hours and hours I spent coming up with the nifty graphics, layout, CSS and color scheme, but that’s another story!)

I will say this though. I’ve started up support chats at one in the morning with these guys and there’s always someone there that seems to know what they’re doing. Good support goes a long way in my book.