The Automattic team has some listings on the WordPress site (I'm sure that some of them are sponsored or affiliates). Most of those listings are from highly reputable webhosting providers, however, these aren't the only providers which satisfy the requirements which allow you to run WordPress.
I personally have been using JustHost for the past 3 months, and have had a few minor issues, but overall, they are a very good host, and cost effective for those of us who live down under in Australia. I have also used a number of hosts in the past, from shared hosts, and reseller hosting through to VPS hosting, however I haven't needed dedicated or colocation hosting yet, and most likely I never will (unless WP Thoughts becomes huge).
Basically the run down of the absolute minimum requirements to run a self installed version of WordPress are:
- PHP v4.3 or newer
- mySQL v4.0 or newer
- Apache
You can use slight variations of webhost environments, such as Windows IIS, or Litespeed, but as long as your host supports the above versions of PHP and mySQL, you are set to run your own website with a standalone version of WordPress.
However, if you would rather have someone else setup your blog for you, you may choose to use WordPress hosted by Automattic themselves.
January 7th, 2009 at 10:37 am
I manage 11 Wordpress installations on my personal server. I found having a virtual dedicated server is better. I pay about $35/month for the power of having complete control over my box, which allows me to install extra apps for some plugins and to automate the wordpress updating process with shell scripts. If you’re comfortable with the Linux shell and have multiple Wordpress blogs to manage then I would highly recommend getting either a dedicated or virtual dedicated server.
January 7th, 2009 at 10:48 am
I’m currently using shared hosting at Justhost.com and haven’t had many problems with them at the moment. There has been some downtime due to other users scripts which I wish hadn’t happened, but I guess thats what you get on shared hosting. I have had a VPS in the past, but didn’t have a real use for it at the time, I was more interested in how to run it all in case I did need to migrate to one.
Angelo, would you be kind enough to share who your virtual dedicated box is provided by?
January 7th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
My Virtual dedicated server is from Godaddy. I pay 12 months at a time and with a discount code you can get a virtual dedicated server for less than $30. I pay extra for FTP backup and additional memory. I think Godaddy now has a simple control panel they give you to setup sites. I’m a bit old school, I prefer to edit my own apache config files, make the directories, etc..
January 8th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I have found that when I use a dedicated service I can install and play around with my WP sites as much as I want. I get my domians from Godaddy and I reassign them to my hosting service. I have unlimited space and so I have started to host other sites and blogs of friends and family and it is working great. Everyone can play with their own sites and they love it.