Are there any specific requirements for web hosting? Seems that some web hosting companies (like ServerPoint.com or gallerywebhost.com) provide custom packages.
Can you please suggest me? Also if you have something to add to list of customize web hosting companies - feel free to add.
And should I use shared web hosting or I need to have more?

Are there any specific requirements for web hosting?

Decide on a gallery to use, then go to the gallery's official website and look for its requirements.

Usually if the host has either GD (http://www.libgd.org/) or ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/) installed on the server, you're probably good to go. Most hosts have them, but you do need to double check though.

And should I use shared web hosting or I need to have more?

That depends solely on your usage. For a small gallery that you share with your family, you're quite likely safe in a shared hosting environment. If you have a popular celebrity pictures gallery, that of course changes. Galleries tend to be quite CPU intensive.

http://gallery.menalto.com/ (which is used by gallerywebhost.com from what I see) and http://coppermine-gallery.net/ are some of the more popular free gallery applications out there.

Keep in mind that space can run short fast, especially if you like to have high resolution pictures.

Helicopter, what sort of galleries do you need/want?

Most hosts offer free script installers with several gallery script options. I have hosted several well trafficked galleries with Innohosting.com, you might give them a try.

Can recomend you Ahosting.biz. They have kit of preinstaled scripts on their servers.

Surely if you need web hosting for gallery, it's better to have it from the web hosting company that specializes in gallery hosting service because gallery is a web-based photo album organizer. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via the web based administration panel. As I see ServerPoint.com provides it for $4.87 per month. Seems O'k.

I fail to see how exactly serverpoint specializes in hosting Gallery.

I can create a hosting company and say "we specialize in hosting x application". Unless there's some description of steps we take to optimize and provide specially designed service/support to those using x application, it may very well be just marketing talk, and our service be nothing else than "common hosting" with a cool "creative" new label.

Hi,

Like duderawk said, most web hosts offer open source scripts, like powweb - http://www.powweb.com/powweb/autoInstalls.bml

You can view compare web galleries list at my website.

The question is do serverpoint.com hosting shared packages meet your requirements in terms of disk space and other resources allocated?
If this is OK, I wouldn't hesitate to use serverpoint.com, they offer 99,95% uptime guarantee. http://serverpoint.com/english/policies-sc.phtml

they offer 99,95% uptime guarantee.

Uptime guarantees are usually worthless. They're just monetary guarantees, and not the minimum level of uptime you'll encounter. If the server is down one full day, a refund of the monthly fee still won't make you happy again.

Originally Posted by ldcdc

Uptime guarantees are usually worthless.

But at least this is something legally fixed in the host's SLA or TOS.
Do you know any other way to get some idea of server stability? Why then people like these 99,99%???

Do you know any other way to get some idea of server stability?

Actual uptime reports of their servers (some might be tempered with by the host though); customer reviews. If you've got the time and know the address of all/most of their servers, you can do monitoring on your own. There are lots of free monitoring services out there.

Why then people like these 99,99%???

Perhaps because they think it's the uptime they'll be receiving.

Originally Posted by ldcdc

Perhaps because they think it's the uptime they'll be receiving.

Do you have the other idea on this point?
Besides ServerPoint.com provides servers that have the hardware and the software that the client needs for his applications to run smoothly.
Gallery web hosting ... hm ... why not?

Originally Posted by annylurk

Do you have the other idea on this point?
Besides ServerPoint.com provides servers that have the hardware and the software that the client needs for his applications to run smoothly.
Gallery web hosting ... hm ... why not?

Since you mentioned ServerPoint, let's take a look at their uptime guarantee:

99.95% UPTIME GUARANTEE
We guarantee that 99.95% of the time your web site will be accessible via IP address to the world. The IP address is the numerical value equivalent to www.yourdomain.com. If your web site is not online 99.95% of the time we will refund the percentage of your monthly hosting fees equal to the downtime. For purposes of this guarantee, Service Outages shall be defined as 20 consecutive minutes of web site (HTTP) inaccessibility. This means 20 continuous minutes, an unbroken sequence of 30 minutes of network outage. But, this guarantee does NOT include:

* planned outages
* partial outages of less than 30 contiguous minutes
* degradation of service due to high packet loss
* any conditions which may be indicative of the Internet as a whole
* specific customer's network/personal computer hardware failure

http://www.serverpoint.com/english/policies-sc.phtml

First, the 20 minutes, which have to be contiguous. If there are lots of 1-10 minutes downtimes at different points in the month, you may have 500 minutes of total downtime, they won't count as downtime with respect to this uptime guarantee.

Second, there's some confusion generated with those 30 minutes they mention later in the clause. Which one is it, 20 or 30?

Lastly, the part regarding compensation:

If your web site is not online 99.95% of the time we will refund the percentage of your monthly hosting fees equal to the downtime.

In layman terms this means that uptime may actually be lower than 99.95%, so the 99.95% is not to be completely relied on. It is not the minimum amount of uptime you'll be experiencing!

Also, it can be directly inferred that if your site experiences 15 days of downtime, you'll get half of your monthly fee. Given their monthly hosting prices, this may be, at best, a "huge" $15 compensation.

As I said, uptime guarantees are usually worthless.

Thanx ldcdc, I partially agree that uptime guarantees might be misread sometimes, but do you see any host providing actual uptime reports either on his site or on request? Testionials is another iffy thing...
For me as a client choosing a hosting plan, serverpoint.com 99,95%uptime guarantee means a lot.
Btw, majority of clients choose this as well
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=509114

do you see any host providing actual uptime reports either on his site or on request?

I've seen some, yes.

For me as a client choosing a hosting plan, serverpoint.com 99,95%uptime guarantee means a lot.

I thought I just explained why their monetary uptime guarantee isn't worth much, if anything. But hey, if it means much to you, that's your prerogative...

As ldcdc said their monetary uptime guarantee isn't worth much, if anything. But hey, if it means much to you, that's your prerogative...
I think too