Well, looks like you can.

Why yet another web hosting review?
Because

• we are sick of affiliate links, sponsored pages masquerading as review,
• we are tired of copied about-us page pretending to be a review,
• a bunch of user ratings cannot beat actually checking out the service and kicking the tires for ourselves,
• we have criteria that other reviews do not cover

What are our criteria? Why we think they are important?

• Good support – should be timely, knowledgeable and polite.
  We are not expecting the hosting support to ace here, just performance at a reasonably acceptable level. Since we know what we are doing and if hosting company know what they are doing too, there is no need for excessive support anyway.
• Honor their money back and any claims/promises (if any).
  We will be asking our money back and checking out any other gimmicks to see if they live up to their claim.
• SSH access
  Without SSH we are like working with one hand tied behind our back. Typically hosting companies that allows ssh are also more technically competent.
• Allow unlimited domain - at least a large enough number
• Attractive pricing
  We are not looking for the cheapest here. Value for money and generally inline with what others are offering. We think a ideal entry level is a monthly payment of less that $9 (not $9/month if you sign up for 3 years).

This would also be a good exercise for us to get to know more about the hosting offerings out there and also to sharpen our skill.

In closing, we want to take this opportunity to recommend you our current hosting provider RapidVPS. In our opinion, they already ace all our criteria so we will not be doing an actual review about them. We had been using them for close to 2 years now. In full disclosure, you should know we are not related to them in any way except as happy paying customer. Also the link above does earn us a referral, but only if you are happy with their service and stay signed-up (which we think you will). So give it a try.

ps. Any host you would like us to try?

In this post we outline steps that you can take to make sure you purchase the right hosting.

1. Get a Linux server that supports PHP and MySQL
   Most PHP, MySQL runs well on Unix server, Linux is popular operating system but you also have FreeBSD.
2. Check the requirement of the scripts you are going to run
   Almost all scripts will list the requirement somewhere. Sometime they are hidden somewhere under different names, for example
   WordPress: Hosting WordPress
   phpBB: Documentation:Requirements
   CMS Made Simple: User Handbook/Installation/Requirements
3. Ask the web hosting company for a phpinfo output
   Most competent webhost will respond to this. The output looks something like this:
   
4. Ask the webhosting company directly
   Alternative, if you don’t want to deal with the technical mumbo jumbo, ask the hosting company directly.
   We recommend though that you try it yourself. It is a good learning process anyway.

Once you have done the above steps, you need to know what to look for. Let’s take the example from the WordPress requirements.

PHP version
This is displayed right on top, for example 5.2.5. WordPress says it need PHP version 4.2 or greater, so we are good (5.2.5 is greated than 4.2).

MySQL
On the phpinfo output page search for “Client API version” (Ctrl+F on IE and Firefox). Check the number give against WordPress requirement which is MySQL version 4.0 or greater.

Apache mod_rewrite
This is optional but is useful for SEO friendly URL and such. So if you need that, check for it. Do a search on the page for “mod_rewrite“. It should appears under the Apache section.

And you are good to go!

For other scripts, there may be other requirements such as safe_mode, magic_quotes_gpc, gd, iconv, mbstring. Simply do a search on the page for them and see the corresponding details that follows.

Most of the time they have very self-explanatory values like “on”, “off”. Sometime the presence or absence of the word suggest it is there or not.

Just follow these few steps and you can easily determine if you can your script on the host.

If you have question about whether your host can run a script, send us a note we can help you take a look.