I do not talk about web hosting very often here on the blog. Not that web hosting is not important, on the contrary without it you can’t have a website. If your web hosting goes down it literally costs you money. Not everyone wants to deal with the hassles of finding a good web host and that is why I always give clients the choice of hosting there website with me or finding their own web host. For the few clients that do decide to find their own web hosting I often recommend a couple of companies that I have had good experiences with.

BlueFur.com has been good to me since I started LGR Computer Enterprises and they continue to provide me with good service and are a Canadian company. I also host several of my own personal web projects with Hostgator and I have been happy with them. Hostgator has also done a lot of work lately to become more environmentally friendly by purchasing wind power to offset the carbon emissions generated by the servers. It is nice to see web hosts moving to be more environmentally friendly.

The control panels that come with both Bluefur.com and Hostgator are cPanel, and while I am happy with cPanel, it can be somewhat daunting to people. There is a learning curve that comes with cPanel and if you are not a geek it can be a little to much. Not all web hosts use cPanel, however, and recently I have started using Dreamhost as well for some projects. Epiblogger for instance was moved over to Dreamhost in August.

Dreamhost uses it’s own web control panel, and I would say it is not as daunting as cPanel is, yet offers people what they need. Most people want to install some kind of content management system and they offer a one click install that you can use to install WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. You can even find the OpenX ad server on the list of software you can install. The one click install can take care of installing the software easily for most people. The best part of the one click install that I have seen on Epiblogger is how quickly the WordPress upgrades are available after being released. When WordPress released 2.6.5 Dreamhost had the upgrade available later that day. The Fantastico installed available through cPanel will take considerably longer before the upgrade is available to install.

Dreamhost is also environmentally friendly and have been longer than Hostgator. That was one of the reasons Epiblogger was moved over to Dreamhost in August. They are carbon neutral, so you can feel a little better about using them as your web hosting knowing that your web site is not throwing even more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Dreamhost also makes it possible for people to create their own promotional codes so if you are looking to try a new web host I have created a special LGR Internet Solutions promotional code for Dreamhost that will give you $50.00 off of your cost if you signup for a year or more. Simply use LGR50 in the promotional code box in step 7 of the signup. Or You can click here to signup to use the LGR Dreamhost promotional code.

Of course if you are one of my blog or web consulting clients and just want me to take care of setting up the hosting for you I would be happy to do that for you. I will even be happy to offer you space on Dreamhost so you can feel good about your website being carbon neutral!

In case you are wondering, most of the links above are affiliate links. If you feel like giving me a Christmas gift you can signup to one of the web hosts I recommend. They are the services I use and I trust. Thanks!