What is the best free and/or paid webhosting service?

Free? None, they all suck. if I had to choose one, I would go with Google Page Creator.
Geocities and Tripod seem so… 90’s

And paid? That’s easy. Media Temple. hands down. They actually have a page called “Why?” it’s pretty convincing.

Is there a price range?

Paid wise I use Bluehost – £55 per year for unlimited domains hosted on one account, includes a .com, and unlimited storage and bandwidth.

Brilliant value and from my experience, about 2 hours downtime in the last couple of years.

Thanks for the responses..

There is no real price range… Just something of good quality for the best price.

As for the free, it’s just a temporary thing, so any suggestion would be nice.

I recently moved over to http://GoDaddy.com. It’s just a personal website that I have there, but the prices are awesome and they have tons of pre-installed apps that you can add like Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, Worpress, etc, at a click of a few buttons. Granted, those are easy to install, but it’s even easier! They’re not really “pre-installed”, I guess, but it saves you the trouble of downloading the software and uploading it to a server and creating databases, etc. Also, the interface isn’t too difficult to use.

Bluehost have a similar auto-install feature called SImplescripts, covering a huge range of webapps from forum technologies to e-commerce, and all the apps mentioned in the above post.

@benseven – yeah, that’s the term, “auto-install”. godaddy has ecommerce, forums, guestbooks, etc, as well, i forgot to mention that.

Free – Bravehost
Best – MediaTemple
I currently use HostPelican – its definitely not the best but i got a coupon for a years worth hosting for $ 8 on eBay and so had to go for them, They have been pretty reliable so far

I use Dreamhost and I’ve never had a problem with them. I actually did a lot of research and almost went with MediaTemple, but they are a little cost-prohibitive. Dreamhost is great because they allow to you create coupon codes for your friends/clients that lets you determine what kind of discount they will get, and in turn you get a referral fee. The bigger the discount you give, the lower the fee you receive. But based on this referral program, I have actually not spent any money on my hosting at all.

Media Temple. Starting at £100 a year ($200 – they are actually US based), stellar customer support (I have a dedicated contact, but even if you don’t they will reply to most support threads within 30 minutes and answer the phone 24/7), amazing amazing amazing. They host some of the biggest projects I’m involved with, and I barely see a single second of downtime. Rails containers and MySQL containers make life much easier — things scale like a dream. I honestly wouldn’t recommend anyone else.

Also; as far as ‘free’ hosting goes, I can’t say I would ever go for it, even on non-profit projects. Out in the start-up days, I paired with two other guys so that we could share a multi-domain hosting account and split the costs three ways. I paid like £20 a year. It’s basically nothing for something that’s so much better than free.

MEDIA TEMPLE, Don’t you dare go with GoDaddy or Bluehost. You’ll have no idea what you’re missing out on.
If you meed something a tad cheaper but with an equally cool interface try out eleven2

FREE or PAID web hosting…

No there are none totally free… but it depends on your needs. There are smaller hosting services like http://www.doteasy.com that charges you $25.00 a year, this includes the “free” web tools (limited, but very decent) your web domain registration and hosting.

If you are interested and well versed in what you will need you can go to http://www.godaddy.com and purchase your domain name (registration) for around $9.99 U.S. and sign up for their free web hosting and add the extras you will need for individual prices/cost.

Check out Cnet and type in the same question. There are many experienced techno-geeks that have been there done that with a lot of hosting sites and have researched the leg work for you.

I think it depends on what you need it for. If you are really concerned about having the best performance, then, yes, by all means pay double for Media Temple.

godaddy has support for Ruby on Rails, Ruby CGI, Python, PHP4 and PHP5, mySQL, ColdFusion, CGI, Perl, and java. Their support is 24/7 phone or email. 150 GB of space and 1,500 GB for transfer. the cost for a plan that includes all of that is $6.99/mo. so you can do a lot with a little bit of money. so far, performance and downtime have not been an issue for me.

@margeryred – you’re wrong, there are plenty of free hosting services, you just have to deal with banners and ads on your web pages.

I can’t believe no-one has heard of http://yakkel.com. It’s completely free and has most, if not all, of the features that any paid host has that I have ever used.

Their support is incredible, I’ve had a response within 10 minutes on every single question I have had…honestly, I don’t see why they don’t everyone doesn’t use them. They even let me use my .com domain…can’t beat that.

After much searching, I’m personally migrating from Godaddy to 1and1.com —cheaper and comes with more features.
10 databases -> 25
10 GB of space -> 120
30 GB of bandwidth -> 1,200 GB
$70/year -> $60/year

I’m done paying for Danica Patrick commercials. :)

oh! and it supports PEARL…