I want to create a personal site with 50MB-100MB of space. I'm not sure how much data transfer I need, and POP3/web e-mail. I want to spend as little as possible and I would like to stay under $50/yr. If I post to the Shared and Reseller Hosting Requests forum, can I trust those companies? What companies are out there that are cheap and are going to be around for a while? Thanks!

When you post in the requests section most of the hosts you can trust. Just make sure that after you receive offers that you do a search for those companies here on WHT (so you can see what others say about them) and read their TOS very carefully.

As Bonnmac stated, research those who make you offers. Do a search here and possibly on Google as well.


Kind Regards,
-Darrell

Make sure they have contact informations on their website and contact them. That way, you know how professional they are and can somewhat get a feel of how they do business.

For $4 a month and depending on your overall requirement, you might get the bottom of the barrel here. If an offer is too good to be true, it usually is.

When you come to shortlisting the contenders, drop them an email with some of your technical concerns and guage them on their responses. Then look around here to guage their reputation and feedback on them by those who used them. Guage the web host's responses in this board to see how they react to different questions. This would usually allow you to determine if you are dealing with a professional or just a kid trying to resell.

But if you ask me, $4 a month I would not be all too concerned about uptime, reputation or support or features.

If you can live without CGI/Perl support then I would recommend SolidInternet.com for $30/yr (http://www.solidinternet.com/plans.html).