(mt)- media temple, have a great rep at the moment and have a very impressive list of clients. Ive seen them recommended and used by some really high traffic blogs so you wouldn’t really go wrong with them, we dont user them at the mo tho as there a little pricey..

http://www.mediatemple.net/

Dreamhost – Is by far the best deal ive seen in ages and they have one of the best online control panels ive seen for a long time. They have had a checkered few months most notably resonantly charging its customers early to the tune of $7.5m . Apart from that little incident with there billing software they have great technical support, more bandwidth and storage that anybody could ever user, SSH access and loads of one click goodies that would have driven the vision wild, SVN, Jabber, WEBDAV … the list is endless. Plus the US exchange rate makes it even cheaper !

http://dreamhost.com/

Almost every host should have one click install for wordpress, but if you want a hand doing it the manual way let me know or just pop round the office on your travels

Here’s a bit more info regarding how ICDSoft squares up to your hit list (I’m not on commission or anything, I’m just genuinely impressed with the service!):

1. I can understand where Paul’s coming from with his control panel comment and not getting sidelined by proprietary control panels, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much – on the few occasions I’ve had to use cPanel or Plesk I’ve found things quite transferable. You can try ICD’s control panel here: http://www2.icdsoft.com/democp/ maybe there’s something similar for cPanel somewhere too?

After the initial set-up, you’ll probably find most of your day-to-day tweaking is done either through wordpress or your HTML editor of choice.

2. upgrading is as simple as clicking a few buttons and then paying a few extra dollars http://www2.icdsoft.com/democp/order.htm
With bandwidth you can upgrade your package for the remainder of your subscription, …or just boost your bandwidth for that month when you post that particularly contentious article!

3. UNIX/Red Hat Linux I don’t really know what that means in more than the vaguest of terms – back over to Pete for that one! No SSH, but you can modify .htaccess like you would any other file. There’s limited cron job functionality though and this is the only short-coming that’s ever made me have to use another host for some projects.

Anyway, you’ve got a range of recommendations based on people’s good experiences – you may have reached the pull-the-host-name-out-of-a-hat stage!

So…in summary I think what you are all suggesting is:

1. Get a user-friendly control panel, but choose a generic one.
2. Have a host where it is easy to upgrade bandwith.
3. Get something that runs Apache on Linux (eek!)
4. Make sure customer support is good.
5. Don’t get hosting from the same place that you have registered your url.

At the moment my url is registered with 1&1, so I guess that rules them out. But I don’t think I’m going to satisfy all of these requirements.

So the list at the moment is:

1. ICDSoft
2. GoDaddy
3. cPanel
4. 34sp
5. dream-hosting
6. hosting.media72.co.uk (from @aeioux on Twitter)

For example, you too can waste whole hours exploring the fascinating world of .htaccess redirects!

http://www.icdsoft.com/hosting.php

The customer support is exceptional for it’s speed (about 5 minutes) and I can only recall one incident of down time and that was after an earthquake…

Backups of databases and files are made daily and held for 7 days so there’s some margin for error whilst you figure out your transfers!

Just email me if you want any more info, and a reseller programme means there’s scope for getting it a bit cheaper if you’re interested!

Have you registered an URL yet? If not, don’t forget the basic rule of registering it through a different company to your hosting. I’ve used GoDaddy before which was cheap but non-descript. I quite like Telivo, for no particular reason other than just ‘cos.

If you’re serious about learning website management, I’d look for a host that doesn’t have its own proprietary control panel. Some of the recommendations given here do (e.g. GoDaddy, 1&1).
Find a host that uses one of the non-proprietary generic control panels. My favourite control panel is cPanel (http://www.cpanel.net), but Plesk is also good.
My reasoning is that if you learn cPanel, you can transfer those skills to any one of the millions of web hosts who use cPanel. However, if you just learn the GoDaddy control panel, you’ll need to re-skill if you ever change hosts.
Also, if you ever move up to your own virtual or dedicated servers you can use cPanel to manage them.
My favourite cPanel host is HostGator (http://hostgator.com) – cheap, reliable, live 24/7 support and a nice community. Their ‘Baby’ plan at about 4 quid a month, allows unlimited domains and subdomains, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited POP3 email accounts, loads of automatic script installers (including WordPress) with more disk space than you’ll ever need (350gb) and loads of bandwidth (3tb, yes terabytes!). Go for the Linux version.

1&1′s basic (two MYSQL databases) business option copes very well with the 4/5 blogs I run on it (plus a good few other sites) and I never hit the limit.

DC-hosting on the othet hand have stung me for extra bandwidth payments on thekittenchannel.com even though most stuff there is hosted offsite (flickr pics etc)