A cursory look at web hosting prices

I've been looking at getting my own domain + server space for some tinkering around as I am interested in doing some web based programming work. There are lots of interesting data mining applications out there and one that just caught my attention was Spokeo, which is an online directory of people with information scraped from all sorts of locations. Consider it like a public version of a CIA database of people, which has personal information including you address, phone number and home value. Obviously, there are some privacy concerns by having this kind of information available, but none the less, an interesting application of data mining.

I am quite interested in learning how to create web services, at least for myself and perhaps expand that to other people if there is time for that in the future. One of my favorite cloud services I use is Dropbox, where I have several computer synced to my dropbox account and have file synced between all of them. Integration is seemless and all operations happen as if you were normally manipulating files through your usual file manager.

I am still on their free account (2 GB limit) and they charge you $9.99/month for 10 GB of storage and then $19.99 for 50 GB/month of space. I think that it is a little on the steep side, but they are running on Amazon's servers which is probably driving costs up. For more space and the ability to share files with myself, I decided that it might be a good idea to look at your standard vanilla web hosts to see what were the prices were like. What I found was that using a web hosting solution (those that were based in North America) were vastly cheaper compared to Dropbox and Japanese web hosts.

I've tabulated the results of what I looked at (from sites that had information that was easily accessible):

Table of web hosts

Interestingly, dropbox when compared with other web hosting services is expensive. Japanese web hosts in general, tend to use tiered pricing for their services and don't provide any unlimited plans which seem to have become popular with North American hosting providers (well, the 2 that I listed, there were more but I didn't bother to list them). With this result, I will want to go with a non-Japanese host as I will get the most bang for my buck. Interestingly, these hosts look ideal as an offsite backup of data, in the case of catastrophic damage, which is a good thing if you want to keep data safe.