It's a perennial question: what is a good, cheap ($10 or less / month) web host with decent features? The answer depends on what the customer is looking for. In my case, I'm guessing my needs are similar to the needs of a lot of other monks: shell access, ssh, FastCGI, mod_perl, PHP, MySQL, truly up-to-date Perl, up-to-date modules, ability to install own modules and software, cron, procmail, java (for running ant), ImageMagick, and some other scripting languages available like Ruby and Python. Multiple domains on one account are important too. Also it would be very good to have some frameworks such as Catalyst, Django, and Rails already installed and working so I don't have to go through all the installation pain to play with or use them. (And yes, there is pain when installing on shared hosts as module and framework authors often neglect to fully test their installations in non-root scenarios.)

The newly changed part of the equation for cheap web hosting is that now with Amazon S3 available, getting a plan with a lot of bandwidth becomes less important. Yet most plans are priced according to bandwidth, rather than other, now more important, features.

I'd like to choose my next hosting plan on features other than bandwidth. The requirements and nice-to-haves listed above are asking for a lot, but would they really be too much to ask for, given that I'm happy to live with less bandwidth?

So if you're tempted to reply to this and say "you get what you pay for", wait, I'm asking for LESS bandwidth in exchange for my more features. Are any web hosts paying attention to the changing equation for storage/bandwidth and adjusting to provide plans that would target customers like me?

Also it would be nice if the host did not support Front Page and did not have a control panel. Sigh.

Things that are less important to me: 100% reliability, hold-your-hand-on-the-easy-issues tech support (though I still hope they have strong staff who can help with the truly hard issues), location (although near a MAE or on a backbone can't hurt).

Are there any hosts out there anyone would suggest that would seem to match up with these requirements?

BTW I've tried Pair and liked it for the most part. But it has this nasty habit of killing processes in the middle of CPAN installs, probably because the process (a CPAN install, for Christ's sake!) is taking too much memory (I'm guessing the limit on memory size is probably around 16MB, and was probably defined back in 1995 or so when 128MB of memory cost $600). Of course when this happens, it's hard to catch because it's often a sub-process and the main cpan script is still running, happily trying to install other parts of the dependency chain. And I'm not sure if Pair supports FastCGI and mod_perl -- if they do, let me know. Hurricane Electric is good but doesn't support FastCGI, and their Perl install is ancient; I had to install my own. And both pair.com and he.net limit the cheap accounts to one domain name.

Money is an issue. This is supposed to be for fun hacking around and learning. If I decide to make it into a business, then yes I will pay more, but my question is about cheap hosting.

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