I remember seeing a hosting company a couple years ago which offered cheap hosting where you only pay by the bandwidth that you consume. I was hoping someone on Sitepoint would remember or be able to suggest a service akin to that as I’m only looking for something to host a holding page at the moment–I’d end up wasting money on most hosting deals for the little bandwidth I’ll likely use.
There is a new product in market known as eNlight Cloud… It also provides the billing predictor but you need to keep in mind that the requirements will never be same nor you will use the similar resources on every day basis. The requirements keeps on changing but the predictor can help you to understand how much resources you will be using and how much amounts you will need to pay for it.
Many cloud hosting offers come with that kind of billing.
As for regular shared hosting, the only company that comes to mind to let you pay what you consume is nearlyfreespeech.net. From what I recall, it’s not exactly inexpensive once you do the math though.
If it’s just a simple holding page, there may be a free host out there you could use until you transfer over to paid hosting.
Any cloud hosts you can recommend?
Rackspace Cloud: Cloud Computing, Cloud Hosting & Online Storage by Rackspace
For the high end hosting packages and niches, I have seen this implementation but for lower end hosting services like shared hosting, it is already very cheap so there is no point in a Pay-As-You-Go payment option.
Hi, Amazon’s AWS services are another example of a “pay per use” arrangement.
Can websites be hosted there? i was under the impression that was just a file server.
Take a look at Amazon S3 for just hosting a single static page.
You should probaby stay away from this sites. There is that old expression, you get what you pay. There are a number of reputable hosting companies that charge a nominal monthly fee. As mentioned Amazon offers this service, but it may not satisfy all your needs.
What about the Ruby/Rails inspired cloud hosting like Heroku and [URL=“http://www.engineyard.com/”]Engine Yard? A bit on the expensive side of your budget? At least you can try Engine Yard for free for 500 hours it says on their website.
Engine Yard sponsored me with some credit for their cloud hosting a while back and they seemed really nice. 
EDIT: Otherwise the mentioned Amazon services are very popular as well. Many use them as file storage though, I believe to minimize HTTP requests and bandwidth usage of their web server hosting. But of course, a lot of people host their sites there too.
EDIT 2: Personally I don’t use these cloud services—I use MediaTemple and they are awesome. They have a bare VPS solution called (ve) that comes with only the OS installed (you can choose which), you’ll have to install the rest yourself but has nice performance at only $20/month. I currently have their more expensive (dv) account type but when the right time comes I will transfer all sites instead to two of the cheaper ones instead of one big expensive—one for production and one for development/testing/experimenting.
But if you wanna go cheap, you always have Hostgator and those kind of shared hosting providers which are like $5/month… I never do shared hosting though, it’s not a long-term solution in my opinion. Depends of course on the project and traffic it will get but I still want the control, root access etc, of a VPS or dedicated server.
Suggest you go for some starter web hosting plan to just have your website getting started. if its just a parking page sometimes your domain registrar may also have free parking-page check with your registrar.
Amazon’s pay as you go service is unknown for a reason - it isn’t popular. In a world where even cellphone minutes have moved away from pay as you go, I think the future is in monthly packages.