Here’s a discussion from the TW2@YahooGroups.com list, looking towards possibly moving NCWU.org to another host entirely.

At 10:04 AM 3/31/05 -0500, I wrote:
>So I thought I’d ask this group — do you have recommended providers for shared hosting service providers - preferably Linux/MySQL/PHP (I’ve about decided life is too short to move too far out of my UNIX comfort zone). A related question is whether anyone can recommend a hosting service that offers Plone.

Thanks, all. Here’s a summary of the responses.

Pair.com has a number of supporters on this list (Susan, Linda, Diane, and even me …).Solid and reliable. Of possible interest is the message from the archives:

>Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 20:55:23 -0400
>From: Diane Wilson
>Subject: Re: Someone mentioned Buy.com - Bad Idea
>…
>Also, Pair Networks (www.pair.com)
>has been outstanding and cheap as a virtual host.

Other recommendations:
Jumpline.com (Linda) - interesting set of apps available (including Coldfusion and Tomcat at the $50/month level) and (be still my heart) they’re using Majordomo (instead of the seemingly ubiquitous Mailman) for lists.

Crystaltech.com (Lisa) - More Windows features (including MS SQL and even Access at $17/month level). Mailing lists available, but “optional” (at an extra $10/month).

Dreamhost.com (Nancy) - They’re less “buttoned down” than Pair: though they’ve been around for years and have hit 100,000 domains hosted, there’s still sometimes the feel of college buddies figuring this stuff out for themselves rather than a “business.” I’m really not normally feature driven — but their web interface for administration (managing ftp/shell/e-mail accounts, MySQL databases, mailing lists, stats, etc) and one-click installs of additional services (compared to Pair’s fairly limited selection at the $10/month level) means I’m going to continue with my plan to migrate ShoemakerGroup.com to Dreamhost. I may be missing some total cost of ownership issues, and I’ll let the list know if I find I regret the choice.

NPSIS.com (Ann Marie) - Choice of UNIX or Windows and reasonable set of features. I don’t see anything comparable to Dreamhost’s control panel for “webmanager self service” of accounts and such.

Zettai.net (Ann Marie) - choice for her Zope hosting (and they do plone, too), though it sounds as if she’s just getting started, so can’t give a personal recommendation for the hosting service. I’m looking at plone since it was recommended to me last fall by NetCorps as something they were starting to use for clients who needed a content management system (and they’ve since converted www.netcorps.org). Haven’t experimented with it at all — but the CMS model is really seductive if I could figure out how to get members of the communities I support to actually use it.

The npsis.com site had a (perhaps self serving) link to www.hostsearch.com and while their rankings may not be gospel, they’ve a few articles on selecting hosting plans that may be helpful. Another view is the lists of hosts supported by www.myden.org if the ability to install custom open source packages is important.

Bottom line is one size doesn’t fit all, of course. My personal preference will opt for mailing list support and the ability to install additional packages, but I haven’t yet hit a real need for something like Zope/Plone. Thanks to the group for helping me round out my list of requirements!