Web Hosting Solutions for Web Developers

There are tons of hosting companies for web developers.
There are many that provide VPS-like solutions.
But there are a few good ones for developers wanting more than the standard LAMP setup and a Fantastico script.
Here we'll look at a handful of the ones that have proven to be good enough.

Webfaction

This is a semi-VPS where you can install your own tools / software as long as it resides in your home directory. Supports Python, Ruby, PHP out-of-the-box.
Plan starts at $9.50 a month for 100GB disk space.

Linode

A fully-fledged unmanaged VPS that has been in the hosting space for quite some time now. Developers normally compared Linode with Slicehost, another great unmanaged VPS before it got acquired by & merged with Rackspace.
Plan starts at $20 a month for 24GB disk space.

DigitalOcean

This is one of the best places to start out for newbies who want to full root-access at a low cost. Its an unmanaged VPS where you can setup your own Linux distro with whatever software you want. Oh - and it may offer the choice of a datacenter in India.
Plan starts at $5 a month for a 20GB SSD disk space.

Amazon AWS

A proven product, if you want scalability & reliability. Some of the major websites / services like Reddit, DropBox, FourSquare, Netflix, Zynga use Amazon AWS. Amazon AWS EC2 is the virtual dedicated hosting service.
Amazon AWS provides a plethora of other services like S3, etc.
You still need to maintain the server on your own - Amazon won't do it for you. Moreover you've got to have sys-admin skills to handle an EC2 instance.

Google App Engine

Google's servers ! That's the best part. Scalability. No worrying of backups, server maintanence, server going down etc etc.
What's the worst part ? It's not the standard setup you get with other providers which provide (S)FTP, SSH etc.
Configuration is done using a file named app.yaml. Everything else is almost custom based.
This is PaaS - Platform as a Service hosting solution and hence you can't go about installing your own software. Instead it provides a wide range of options and custom solutions. Currently Python, Java, Go and PHP are the languages supported.

Others :

• Heroku
• EngineYard