This could be the start of a long consultation. My standard rate is two pints an hour at the DWH
This site is hosted on my company's own dedicated servers located in Houston Texas. They are rented from
http://www.ev1servers.net. EV1 (formerly Rackshack). The best in 'value hosting' IMHO. They have weathered hurricanes & power grid failure without a hiccup.
A complete server at EV1 is from $99/month - great value and enough for a hundred Sydenham Town or so sized sites. Shared hosting is never going to be as reliable. The cheaper you go the more the hoster will pile into the server to recover the costs. The more likely an overload, have a user do something silly enough to crash or sharing with a scammer/spammer who will get the server blacklisted.
Its been nearly four years since we shifted on to dedicated servers. Before that I used Architec & Xcalibre for hosting. They were both very good in different ways but I would not know how they rate these days.
My advice would be for your friend to get and retain complete control of the domain including the setting of the DNS. Then if the hosting service has a problem - you can simply redirect the domain to another server. No hoster IME has time to answers support calls when trying to sort a sick server.
Re PHP/Perl. I'm old fashioned - I believe PHP is fundamentally less safe. The forum software, phpBB, is the only major PHP application I run. That's my starter for ten. Not much help as you see. There are some Usenet groups which may have more relevant advice.
Admin
) is looking at setting up a web site - and asked me if I know any good hosting service providers - and I don't.. But... SydenhamTown seems to be pretty reliable to me - who do you use to host this site? Any regrets / doubts / troubles ?