I use NearlyFreeSpeech.net <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/>, which I heard about from BugMeNot. It's pay-per-use, so it can be very cheap (equivalent to a few cents / month, except it's not billed monthly). If you have a spike in traffic, they'll handle that just fine, since each site isn't bound to a single physical server. That also means your site isn't slowed down if some neighbor uses a lot of resources.

Some drawbacks are that there's no FastCGI, so no Django or Rails, and you can't get your own IP address, even for money, so no TLS. Also, it's Apache 1.3, if you care. If you just need to run some Wordpresses, they do a bang-up job or running mod_php 5.

NFS was exactly who I was going to say. They're awesome. Plus you can run Haskell, Lisp, Scheme, OCaml, etc via CGI to play around with :)

Doesn’t Amazon do something similar?

S3 is pay per use, but it's for static data hosting. EC2 is pay-per-use virtual machines, but it's at the granularity of machines. If you need a bunch of real, or real-looking servers, that's good, but it's too expensive if what you need is shared hosting.

S3 is cheaper than NFSN, so if you have lots of big files, you can host www.example.com on NFSN and point media.example.com to S3.

(Grain of salt: I haven't used EC2.)

I recommend Powweb to everyone. Reasons why I love them:

- cheap: $7.77/month

- reliable: i've never seen them go down

- advanced developer features: cron, .htaccess, php.ini editing

- really clean user interface (forget using godaddy)

- amazing customer support: call them. they answer first ring. there's no waiting for hours after trying to navigate crappy phone tree systems.

i've used a dozen different shared web hosts over the years and the vast majority of them suck. Powweb really stands apart from the crowd, especially when it comes to advanced features and customer support. When I was doing web design consulting I moved every single one of my clients over to Powweb -- they're that much better.

http://www.powweb.com/join/index.bml?AffID=563885

Here's a great site that pings and monitors shared hosting accounts. Price isn't really a correlating factor.

http://www.realmetrics.com/r/shared-hosting

cool, /upvote

Slicehosting is great, but you need to do all the dirty work, like choose the OS, setup apache, do the security, etc.

I'm using MT's Grid and have had good luck, but you have to be on Grid Cluster 1- it seems like Cluster 2 is down every week.

Someone actually recommended http://asmallorange.com to me recently, but I have no experience with them.

Slicehost

I'm pretty skeptical about most shared hosts, so I set up my own hosting environment. I host my own sites via a data center in Santa Clara, and a few other people's, as well. Feel free to get in touch.

Think about whipping up a quick Facebook app and getting a free Facebook accelerator from Joyent. They are free for an year and you can host other stuff on it. Wicked fast and run on Solaris (which can be a bitch in the beginning if you are used to the Linux environment, but they have Webmin, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, Apache, LightHTTPd, etc. preinstalled).

http://joyent.com/developers/facebook/

I personally like ASmallOrange; they're a small gig, but their customer service is AMAZING - I've been hacking, had a problem at 1 am in the morning, emailed them about it and got it fixed in half and hour - three times already.

www.asmallorange.com

Their prices are reasonable, too, and the shell access is great, but the speed isn't blazing, although very acceptable. You should be fine if you're not too graphics intensive.

webfaction has served some of my friends well.

for shared hosting I highly recommend webfaction as well. I've used them until I needed to move to a VPS.

another +1 for webfaction, really simple django deployment

+1 for webfaction here.

if you're willing to pay up to $50 why not upgrade to a mediatemple (dv) VPS?

Agreed. I currently have a VPS with Rimuhosting and it's just shy of $40-50/month. All servers come pre-configured with all the basics. If you ever need something installed/configured which is out your realm the support staff is great about guiding you how to do it or just doing it for you.