My guild's website's contract with the host is up in a couple of weeks, and I want to move off of it. In general, the host (ipowerweb) has had annoying outages related to the php and forum software. It would also crash the website whenever someone tried uploading a video to the ftp server. I would have switched off of it a while ago, but as long as I was paying for the server space...

But now, I have the option to move off of them to another webhost. I want to host the standard WoW guild things (forums, PHP setup for a DKP page, front page news). I also want to host videos and images without worrying about being hit with bandwidth fees or having the forums portion of the website shut down. And, of course, cheap.

So, I'm looking for recommendations on web hosting- including horror stories about lousy hosts. I'm also interested in good website packages, especially ones that can integrate with phpbb (our forum software). The images section of our current website went underused because it was difficult to access it from the forums section. Having everything be near maintenance free is also a requirement. I can mess around with php or html code, but I lack the time to devote to it. I also need people with little html knowledge and no php knowledge to be able to enter in DKP and news into the site with ease.

dreamhost.com comes highly recommended. never heard any horror stories.

and they have some nice reward schemes making them extremely cheap for the first year.
using referral code 'VODRIN' can get $97 (full discount) off the bill.. theres plenty other codes for $97 too (i used 'james' for mine). but it comes to a year of hosting with domain/200gb diskspace/2000gb bandwidth for about 20$. all the bits you would need for hosting a guild website.

I've used http://www.bluehost.com for a while now for a few domains. their control panel is excellent, their ftp manager is great, you get a boatload of diskspace and bandwidth, and their tech support is top notch. I've used 6 or 7 different web hosts for myself and clients over the past few years, and bluehost has by far been my fav. (we use forum software and eqdkp on it, btw)

If you can get on uberguilds, I highly recommend it. The first time we ever hit 1k concurrent forum users, after visc, our site crashed within seconds. Now we had 1k+ concurrent users for over 24 hours after 5 manning loatheb and I didn't even notice a slowdown browsing the forums.

Yeah we use dreamhost as well, and generally they're pretty good. For in-guild forums they have enough CPU with their shared plans to not be too annoyingly slow, and their bandwidth and storage limits are pretty enormous, especially for the killer price. Their uptime leaves something to be desired, though, at least once a week our site will be down for 10 seconds to 10 minutes. It's down right now, in fact.

For the price, I'm not sure you're going to do any better, though.

DreamHost is about as good as you're going to get for a cheap webhost. The only problem you might run into is that they aren't very forgiving when it comes to high CPU usage, so if your forums gets a moderate amount of traffic, it might be best to look elsewhere.

Honestly, if you don't have time to devote to maintenance and your forums aren't too popular, DreamHost would be my only recommendation. Otherwise you're much better off going dedicated sooner rather than later. Dicking around with things like a VPS or a grid system are just not worth the hassle.

Dreamhost works pretty well considering its price, they offer everything you need to set up guild website and a lot more. Only issue I've had with them is that hosting server my sites are on was running dangerously low on disk space, which caused all kinds of havoc when uploading new content or installing new software using their default packages.

Though their referral system causes lots of spam every time someone asks for hosting solution as everyone tries to get potential sign ups to use their referrer code :)

What about Ventrilo?

Thanks. I'm not expecting to get much forum or website traffic, as it's mostly a private forum. It's just that the webhost we were using would crash about once a week during a run (because of people checking DKP/strategies) and updating DKP would always shut down everything else as it cycled through that. So DreamHost it is!

I would like to know more about various php plugins people are using on their sites, I guess. I especially want stuff that integrates with the forum software, because the majority of my guild will go there and ignore most of the other options.

EJ uses http://nrgservers.net/

Never had a problem for the past 2 years I've been renting it.

1. I would really take the time to transfer to PunBB if you move hosts because phpbb sucks nuts. It's an extra evening or two of work but worth it in the long run.

2. We use hostrocket and haven't had any trouble in 2 years.

as a professional web designer i can say that nothing beats www.one.com

We've been using an nrgServer for little over a year now, and never had any problems. The server's gone maybe 3 times so far, and never for more than an hour.

Were you able to get the punbb Migration tool to work? Or did you just start with new forums?

The migration tool worked without a hitch.