Advice on Web Hosting Services

[rdegler]

I am helping my wife set up her consulting web site. We need to register the domain name and find web hosting.

Does anyone have positive experiences to recommend a web hosting company?

Some needed features:

• PHP and MySQL

• multiple email addresses

• realiable- not a lot of down time

• Reasonably priced

Please let me and others know your experiences.

Thanks
roy

 

[VictorLazlo]

I can personally recommend ProHosting
I've been doing business with them for almost 5 years and I've been treated very well.

Their basic $17.95 plan has all the features you requested.

 

[ojai00]

Where's RossMAN when you need him? I think he would link you here: Web Hosting Talk forums I use Namecheap for my domain name service. They also have web hosting services but I have no experience with that. Hope this helps.

 

[azev]

I used intermedia.net, they are a little on the expansive site, but they are great.

 

[Soybomb]

I think you get what you pay for. Find the cheapest one and you're going to have problems (cyberwings...heh). Anyway I've hosted some stuff with www.pair.com for like 5-6 years now. They're awesome and priced fairly. They run freebsd boxes that are rock solid. They're upfront about problems and publish them as they happen http://www.pair.com/pair/support/notices/ Their network is pretty sweet too http://www.pair.com/pair/support/library/status/network.html

 

[JackMDS]

If the hosting is for business purposes few $$$ a month should not be the deciding point.

The big differences between hosting services is on the amount of support that you can get.

Most of the cheap hosting services consider as support technical issues that involve their system functioning. They are running Linux Boxes based on a lot of free software. It is OK to choose such a plan if you would like to learn in out all the issues involving maintaining a functional Site on a Linux system using PHP MySQL etc.

If you can maintain the usage of PHP, and MySQL on your own, and you need a lot of email accounts, get an inexpensive reseller account (some start at $10 a month). You do not have to resell any thing but you get more flexible email handling with reseller account.

If you do not want to get involved on all of these issues, and prefer to use a straight forward comprehensive package that your wife can learn on her own (like MS FrontPage).

You better pay more and get a good host that provides good friendly functional support.

P.S. Please guys do not start now a FrontPage bashing I use it only an example. And actually for none-geeks it a good choice.

 

[Soybomb]

The big differences between hosting services is on the amount of support that you can get.

I don't look for hosts in the business of hand-holding. Not to say they aren't out there and you can't pay a little more to get them though. Just like you can pay a little more for more support, I think you can pay a little more for better infrastructure too. That might be bigger UPS(es...or whatever), more generators, better hvac system, a more diversified network with more bandwidth, better machines to prevent against hardware related downtime, better admins on shared machines, etc.

 

[RossMAN]

rdegler - What's your monthly budget?

 

[Buddha Bart]

Hostway, Interland, and Pair are the "big shots". They cost more, but they don't joke around.

 

[chsh1ca]

ICDSoft is a pretty good web provider. Comes with 300MB of drive space, very reliable, for about $65USD/year. They also tack on Domain registration on that. Very excellent service, and I've never had any problems with them.

 

[ourweb5]

I own a web hosting company. I would be happy to customize a plan for your wifes company.

 

[rdegler]

I finally decided on crediblehost.com good support (by email/online support). They offer phone but ask for customers to use email and online support first.

up and running with use of 3 domains and all at less than $30 / year

I hope it continues as the first weeks have gone.

look here to see web site My Web site let me know how speed of loading is and if you feel so inclined to comment on web design be my guest.

thanks all for your input.
roy

 

[patrickj]

Anyone have experience with Windows hosting? I have several sites that have been created in FrontPage and I am now beginning to outgrow DixieSys. I need a Windows hosting service that has (hopefully) comparable support for a reasonable cost. Gary and the people at Dixiesys have been fantastic and I would prefer not to leave. I don't need hand holding, but I do need realiable uptime etc.

Please don't reply if you are gonna get into FrontPage and MS Hosting vs. hand coding and Linux hosting. I'm not interested....the choice to use FrontPage and now possibly needing Windows hosting was/is strictly a business decision and I stand by it....

Alternatively, if somebody can point me to a good html resource on creating a search page....The broken page is at www.shareholdersonline.com/search_page.htm I don't think this will work on a Red Hat host using FrontPage Extensions, and I would be willing to rewrite it (hand code) to stay where I am hosting.

Either way, thanks for any assistance you can offer...

 

[cmetz]

patrickj, I know of folks who host Windows/FrontPage and are reliable, but I don't think they can touch DixieSys on price. Dixie's prices are good for what you get.

Depending on what kind of content you have, you might seriously consider just having a search link that feeds to Google prepending "site:www.shareholdersonline.com" - a bunch of places do this, and it works well. Let Google spider you and let them do the searching. Requires static content or spiderable content, many super-dynamic/database-driven sites can't do this.

 

[patrickj]

Originally posted by: cmetz
patrickj, I know of folks who host Windows/FrontPage and are reliable, but I don't think they can touch DixieSys on price. Dixie's prices are good for what you get.

Depending on what kind of content you have, you might seriously consider just having a search link that feeds to Google prepending "site:www.shareholdersonline.com" - a bunch of places do this, and it works well. Let Google spider you and let them do the searching. Requires static content or spiderable content, many super-dynamic/database-driven sites can't do this.

Thats an interesting solution to the problem, however, the more I think about this, the more I'm not quite sure how to do it. My document library is primarily adobe acrobat docuements. Several people pointed me to cgi-resources.com to find a canned script. The problem is that I haven't figured out how to index .pdf documents. In fact, I'm not sure that this can even be done. I'll probably end up creating this page by hand through a lot of trial and error and then tweaking to see if I can get what I want. Thanks for the idea though...I will try it just to see how it works.

Just out of curiousity, who are the hosting companies that you are referring to? I'd still like to see what is out there for Windows/FP hosting.

 

[cmetz]

patrickj, Google can index PDFs. Do a few searches and convince yourself

I'll PM you the info.

 

[patrickj]

Then I must be doing something wrong...my site content doesn't really show up on Google correctly. Its very weird, some of pages/documents show up, but from different domains, I have the .com, .net, and .org, but it's not consistent. PM me the info so I can test it out.

Thanks...