If you're comparing shared hosting companies you're not really comparing anything at all. They all have the same business model -- stuff several hundred to several thousand sites on each server, advertise unlimited resources but terminate any site that uses more than the average. If you want to handle more than a trickle of traffic, you need dedicated resources -- that means $20 a month or so for a VPS.

Once you switch you'll never go back. Having your site operating at the whim of some resource checking script will seem ridiculous. The idea of paying for "10 domains" or "20 mailboxes" or "100 subdomains" will make you laugh since you now realize these things are nothing more than few lines of text in a configuration file -- not actual scarce resources to be portioned out at different fees. The idea of not being able to upgrade your language versions or install your own packages will seem appalling. It's worth the couple extra dollars a month.

I totally agree- once you go vps you'll never go back.

I have heard good things about http://linode.com/

I've used Linode to host my personal website and various side projects over the last 2 years and I've been very pleased. For low traffic sites and small apps the $20 per month plan has been sufficient.

In response to both dangrossman and ohashi, sorry to not add this info to the question.

The problem with me is my app will have subdomains for each user. For example, `john.myapp.com`. These subdomains are each going to be password-protected areas with healthy amounts of embedded video and I just don't trust the shared hosting I currently have.

You've both recommended VPS. Any input on that?

What do you think of something like this from MediaTemple: http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/ve/ ?

The videos are embedded from Vimeo, so the concern for me is just having good uptime and reliability and not having to worry too much about running out of "disk space" and bandwidth.

> The problem with me is my app will have subdomains for each user. For example, `john.myapp.com`.

Sounds pretty straightforward. Wildcard DNS entry, wildcard vhost -- two lines of text that say "point all DNS queries to the IP of my VPS, point all HTTP requests to this document root (your app)", then your app has some code that looks at the hostname in the request to decide which site to show. Subdomains are not 'things' that take up any resources.

> These subdomains are each going to be password-protected areas with healthy amounts of embedded video and I just don't trust the shared hosting I currently have.

If all the videos are embedded offsite, then they really have no impact on your choice of hosting solution. You don't have to handle the bandwidth or storage or even the HTTP requests for the videos. A shared host wouldn't know or care if you put a million videos on each webpage -- it would have no impact on their server. It'll have no impact on yours either.

> What do you think of something like this from MediaTemple: http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/ve/ ?

Considering it's an unmanaged service, I don't see why you'd pay them $30/month when Linode is only $20/month and has a perfect review record among HN hackers.

Great answers man, thank you! I feel pretty good about Linode. I'm going to look more into it and shop around a bit more. Thanks for all the help.

First of all, you haven't really defined a decent amount of traffic. Where are you bottlenecking? database? bandwidth? cpu?

I agree with dangrossman that going from one shared host to another isn't going to go well most likely. Of course, that depends on the bottleneck. I've got a shared host running SSDs, if my bottleneck was disk i/o it might work on that while failing on shared hosts using something slower.

If you really are pushing a lot of traffic and having trouble with shared hosting though, it's time to upgrade. VPS/Dedicated/Cloud are the options I would be looking at. Also possibly a CDN depending on what the bottleneck is of course.

Has anyone here used media temple's $20/mo service? I'm looking into that as well

It's shared hosting with all the drawbacks that implies, yet without the price benefit of shared hosting anywhere else. If you have $20 per month to spend on hosting you have two choices -- if you want managed, shared hosting, save some money and buy it somewhere cheaper. If you want the full control of a VPS and can manage it, then spend that $20 on a VPS somewhere else and get much more.