small business website hosting.

[Brian D]

My wife is starting a small business, selling one item initially. Does anyone have any feedback on business hosting companies? We mainly need info on who is reliable and easy to setup, with the ability to make a secure site that can handle credit card purchases. She already has a site designed, where to go for hosting is the big question. We looked on Hostsearch.com, but a lot of the feedback there is sort of shaky.

I searched here, and most of the info found was more related to personal sites. If anyone is better at searching, a kick in the ass in the form of a link would be greatly appreciated. Neither of us are computer pros, but she is fairly savvy with systems and software, just no experience with hosting.

Thanks for any input!

Edit-How does this plan (http://home.commspeed.net/web_hosting.html) look? This is through our home ISP, who have been very good with tech support. A local company has some advantage, I would think.

[prohydro]

I would check out Dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com), they are set up to handle business sites. I have several sites with them, and I'm really happy. Cheap, loads of server space and bandwidth, and tons of options for business sites.

[Brian D]

Thanks Chris, I had seen them mentioned in this thread, (http://corner-carvers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9358&page=2&highlight=hosting) and they are on our shortlist to check out more throughly. Have you noticed much downtime, and how is their tech support?

[chrish012]

I would check out Dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com), they are set up to handle business sites. I have several sites with them, and I'm really happy. Cheap, loads of server space and bandwidth, and tons of options for business sites.


Wow. I was going to suggest Hosting Matters (http://www.hostingmatters.com), i've used them before and have had nothing but good things to say but dreamhost seems to be a much better deal. Still may be worth checking out...i'm not sure exactly what you're looking for.

[90 5.0]

I've been using this place (https://idp.securepaynet.net/login.aspx?isc=wwbb42&se=%2B&prog%5Fid=2create&spkey=SPSWEB78&login=&target=secure%5Ftransfer%2Easp%3Furl%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fmya%252Esecureserver%252Enet%252FDomains% 252FManageDomains%252Easpx)to host my site for almost 2 years, with no problems. (Knock wood!) They're an all-in-one kind of package. You create your own site (pretty easy) with professional-looking templates and they host it for you. I only pay about $7.95/month for hosting, which includes an email account. Not a ton of storage, but if you manage it well, you can make it work.

[fspgti]

I've had good luck with Verve Hosting (http://www.vervehosting.com) . Cheap, reliable and lots of controls and reports. I'm using 1 and 1 Hosting (http://www.1and1.com) currently. It is just as reliable but does not have as many controls or reports. I can't say enough good things about Vervehosting, it was excellent.

[dennis68]

I pay 12/month for SBC small business (now AT&T). That includes 5GB of storage and 200GB of bandwidth. It is FrontPage and most ftp programs compatible so uploading is pretty basic. It also includes a few very basic publishing tools that are web based (nothing to download).

[prohydro]

Hi Brian,

So far I have experienced zero downtime on my sites, and only a couple of scheduled maintenance downtimes for the user control panel (which were done late at night).

The one time I have used the tech support I got a quick response via email which solved my problem. They have a great support Wiki that has taken care of all my "obscure" problems I've had. For instance, I was trying to get some things installed in Ruby-On-Rails, and I hit the Wiki first. I had the answer within a few minutes.

Good luck!

[Ron L]

FWIW, I've used westhost.com for the past 3 years with no problems. I read about it on a message board about hosting services and decided to give it a shot.

[Brian D]

Thanks for all the leads guys, we are going over the plans linked for the best fit. She actually got the site up on our small personal space, for debugging. So far, so good!

[Buckshot77]

OK, this is the best fit I could find for my question. Unfortunately I'm mostly in the dark about how to actually go about setting up a true web based business, yet I find myself smack in the middle of doing it for my wife.

The basic details of the business are: webstore with 50-100 products initially, 50-100separate pages to review all products, and 20-50 general info pages. Probably expansion within 6 months to include more items, but we can adjust the hosting package at that point if needed. Site will have pictures of each product and some hi-res images, but no plans for streaming videos, etc.

My questions are pretty basic involving the actual mechanics of a web store:
1) Do any of you have recommendations for shopping cart software to use? I've gotten a recommendation for www.1shoppingcart.com but that's about it. We also want to send off the basic shopping cart for additional programming to add some custom functions such as wish list, customer recognition, etc.
2) Any suggestions on calculating how much storage and bandwidth I'll need to host the site? I'd guess a rough total of 100 pages or less with no forums or anything like that to eat up huge amounts of transfer/bandwidth. Should I try to keep my hosting company separate from my shopping cart company or does it matter?
3) Has anyone tried using a site that incorporates all of their needs into one? I've been looking at using Quickbooks for our accounting software and they have some recommended vendors that allow pretty much full integration with the software, plus offer shopping carts, hosting, and integrated credit card processing as well. www.godaddy.com and www.homestead.com are the two fully inegrated sources I've been looking at.
4) I'm looking at using www.cardservice.com for my CC transactions as they've been recommended highly. Do you have any other recommendations?

I'm slowly learning the rest by reading and asking, but if anyone has some whiz bang great ideas that I could use or resources for me to read from, post away!

Thanks,
Rick

[47CP]

Rick,

Do you have any basic HTML skills? If so, I would highly recommend Mals E Commerce...www.mals-e.com

This is an inexpensive, very flexible cart that works REALLY well. It uses simple HTML function calls on your server/host to put things into the cart, and all the secure processing is handled on their end so you don't have to deal with it.

The downside is if you need a database driven site, then you will have to hire out some custom programming. I'm pretty sure there are some review and wish list scripts out there that will work too.

But you really can't beat the flexibility of his system. It is actually free unless you need the premium features, and the premium version is only $65 per year.

If you need an all in one service, we are slowly transitioning to MonsterCommerce. But, it runs at least $100 per month, and you do lose some flexibility that you have in Mal's. I also looked at OSCommerce and ZenCart. They both looked a little more powerful than Monster, but seemed to involve a pretty high level of tinkering to make them work.

I've read some ugly things about cardservice, though I don't know if they are true. We use Nova systems which is setup through our local bank. We use Authorize.net for online gateway. I would probably look pretty hard at the integrated QuickBooks solution if I had to do it over again.

QuickBooks is a great program, and full integration is nice. However, if your business takes off, QuickBooks will quickly become a roadblock. When we shipped 20-30 packages a week, QB was great. Now, we do 25-50/day and we have maxed QB out. We are transitioning to a dedicated product for mail order called StoneEdge Order Manager.

My point is to look hard at getting married to a QB integrated product from top to bottom as it may hurt you down the line.

Have you looked at something like Yahoo? They charge a percentage fee, but have a pretty powerful system and certainly offer good exposure.

Disclaimer: My biggest product is numbers and class letters for cars, and in order for this to be orderable online, the cart must have the ability to set the quantity before you put the item in your cart. E.G. to order 47 CP for both sides of the car, you need to add 2-4's, 2-7's, etc. This simple feature is not available on MANY carts, and that greatly affected my search. In fact, we were planning on going with Yahoo until I figured out that little gotcha. This issue probably isn't as important to most other merchants.

Hope this helps a little,

DaveW

[SHOboy]

I've used godaddy for years. Their superbowl ads rock. ;)

But I don't have much to compare it to for the sort of business apps that you indicate.

I'm happy with godaddy, but I don't ask much of 'em, either.

[Buckshot77]

Dave,

Thanks for the information. While I would love it if we were to start off shipping 20-30 packages a day, I just don't see it happening anytime soon. My guess is that we'd be lucky to start at 1-2 per day and grow to 20 per day in the next few years. At that point, I think we'd be able to upgrade to a more dedicated software. As it sits now, we're looking for ease of use, relatively low cost, and some type of integration for inventory management as we can't stock too many of each product as the inventory cost would kill us because of color, style, and size combinations. Another plus is our actual accountant that does our filing and yearly taxes works well with Quickbooks so it's easy to get help from him if needed when we're setting up different modules like inventory and such.

Rick

[68rustang]

Rick,

I am in the midst of moving all of my stuff to GoDaddy. I am just starting to mess around with the Quick shopping cart package they have so I don't have much feedback in regards to that yet. What I will say is their control panel is very easy to use and their tech support is top notch.

[gsr20det]

I've been using a version of www.oscommerce.com from www.creloaded.com for two years now. Has a lot of trick features, a really nice admin interface and lots of customizing options can be bought/installed cheaply or are even free. Templates are easy to have updated for a unique look, and there's lots of PHP developers that know how to tweak things if you don't. There's also a few forums on how to use/tweak OSCommerce, too.

I have made a lot of customizations to make it work for the business I work for, and the guys at CRELoaded have been very helpful supportive if there's ever been an issue. We have more than doubled our business since having a shopping cart versus a static html site that had people call in to order.

[SilverHorseRacing]

We're using LiteCommerce ( an ala carte version of X-Cart) hosted on EWD Hosting.

The host is a small company, but he (E of EWD) has been very helpful, answering emails at 2:00 am if needed to get me sorted out - much better than the failure central I was on with Ipowerweb.

The software is easy, and although the Russians get you for every modification, most of it is already there, and it works well. I have no real complaints.

You can check it out here:

www.SilverHorseRacing.com

BTW, it's my day job now, so if you need anything for a Mustang, give me a shout :)

[ddavidv]

I've used Homestead for my personal site for the last, oh, 5-6 years. I am a total dweeb when it comes to html or anything the least bit computer geeky. It's incredibly easy to use. I pay about $100 per year for it. I've never known it to be down. My site is mostly for the amusement and education of others, but lots of folks have set up some pretty impressive business sites on it. They also give you free site stats that are interesting to peruse (search keywords used to find you, countries of origin of the hits, and other fun stuff).http://www.mongrelmotorsports.homestead.com is my home page, and there's a link at the bottom that will take you to the Homestead main site.

[wally8]

Rick,

The only hosting tech I have to add is that we use one of the turnkey ecommerce packages. We use ChannelAdvisor. Another good one might be Infopia which I’ve talked with extensively. They’re basically a clone of ChannelAdvisor. I’ll add that too that Quickbooks starts to suck pretty quickly.

These guys are a little different than you’re currently looking at. They automate some of the tasks to get you into the various marketplaces. A couple of things up front. If you’re just starting out and don’t have much sales history they may not even want to talk to you but if they do talk to you know that the numbers they throw out (monthly fees) are highly negotiable. Just for background, we’re typically in Ebay’s top 250 sellers and we move about 1500 – 3000 items a week. I actually work mostly for the sister company to this one but I’m responsible for the IT portion and get pulled in on the operations side quite a bit (whenever they’re trying to figure something out).

We use them mainly because they can convert our inventory directly into Ebay listings. They also will feed it automatically to Google Base (which we do as well) and can create listings on Amazon.com (something we should be doing). There are several other shopping channel feeds that they will push to automatically as well (shopping.com, etc).

In addition to all that, they also give you a pre-made online store that you can redirect your domain to that will run a store based off of your inventory. This implementation is somewhat limited but you can do some pretty nice stuff if you know what you’re doing. Ours sucks because I’m not much of a whiz on website design and I’m not incentivized to come up with something really good.

Their inventory system is fairly good but if you have a fairly large warehouse it’s lacking in features. It will handle drop shipping arrangements though which is something you’ll probably be interested in eventually.

If you’d like to start a separate thread to discuss the technical aspects of actually marketing your items online (which marketplaces and what strategies) I’d be interested in discussing that too. I’m not an expert but I’m fairly far down the road on Ebay and I’m looking at how to best use the other marketplaces, particularly the most effective use of Google adwords and keywords. We’ve been successful in Ebay but that’s a small and shrinking part of the picture and if you want to survive you need to be competent with all the channels possible. We have some work to do there.

Unbelievably you’re in my neck of the woods so if you want to actually see something I could probably help you out.

Later….


Wally

[Buckshot77]

The main question I came up with after perusing various sites until I went blind last night deals with the entire shopping cart function and hosting.

The vast majority of the shopping carts are all charging recurring monthly fees. Why is that? I would think that a shopping cart would be more like software you download to create a webstore that is then uploaded to your hosting site. Since I'm looking at customizing the store as it is with a few special features we want to add, does it matter if we use a monthly paid cart or a software version?

The second question I came up with is in relation to the shopping carts that have webspace available with them. Can you use this space to host the non-shopping cart areas of your site or do you have to buy separate hosting space for them and then have your shopping cart as some type of sub-domain?

A little further info on how I want to set up the site is that it isn't truly a storefront that you get to straight away. You'll come to a homepage that will tell about our shop, what we have to offer, have some various links on it, and be a gateway to link to our store. The actual store will end up being set up as I guess what would be called a subdomain. The site will have numerous information pages with additional product information, sizes, etc on them linked both from the homepage and from the web store. So really, I'm creating both a website and store all at once so I'm trying to figure out if they can be integrated all in one package or do they just have the appearance of being all in one to the customer?

Thanks,
Rick

[tfalk]

I've been using a cart from http://commerce-cgi.com for a while now. It takes a little
getting used to and there are not a lot of gateways supported. If you use Paypal to
handle your payments, it's pretty easy. If you want any of their extra wiz-bang
add-ons, you can join for a 1-time $69 payment. Not bad...

I looked at a couple of different carts. There are a lot of choices if you don't mind
spending the money, I wanted something cheap or free. I also wanted something
that would be hosted on my own server, not theirs. The biggest stickler for me was
finding a cart system that you didn't have to create a login/id just to buy 1 frickin
item. With the one I'm using, I have no customer info to retain, no credit card info
to worry about losing, etc. It's just simpler.

[SilverHorseRacing]

The main question I came up with after perusing various sites until I went blind last night deals with the entire shopping cart function and hosting.

BTDT... about three months I spent playing with all the demos before I settled into litecommerce.

The vast majority of the shopping carts are all charging recurring monthly fees. Why is that?

Because they can... and many people are not savvy enough to care, because they justify it as "they are making money, so why not spend some..."


I would think that a shopping cart would be more like software you download to create a webstore that is then uploaded to your hosting site. Since I'm looking at customizing the store as it is with a few special features we want to add, does it matter if we use a monthly paid cart or a software version?

Again, that's what we have with our host and software - which I own the license to.


The second question I came up with is in relation to the shopping carts that have webspace available with them. Can you use this space to host the non-shopping cart areas of your site or do you have to buy separate hosting space for them and then have your shopping cart as some type of sub-domain?

A little further info on how I want to set up the site is that it isn't truly a storefront that you get to straight away. You'll come to a homepage that will tell about our shop, what we have to offer, have some various links on it, and be a gateway to link to our store. The actual store will end up being set up as I guess what would be called a subdomain. The site will have numerous information pages with additional product information, sizes, etc on them linked both from the homepage and from the web store. So really, I'm creating both a website and store all at once so I'm trying to figure out if they can be integrated all in one package or do they just have the appearance of being all in one to the customer?

Thanks,
Rick

Well, that's pretty much how I have our store set up. It's an extension off of the main website, which replaced the crappy Paypal button page we had when I was sure it was all ready to go. The integration of it makes it pretty seamless, although it is all php pages on the webstore side, vs html on the site side.

Again, I'd say EWD hosting really is worth a look - Emerson has done nothing but good for me since my first contact with him all the way through to getting everything uploaded and ready when our old service gave us crap. My site downtime was between 2am and 6am when he made the switch and the DNS servers were catching up. Not bad, not bad at all.

[wally8]

Most of those outfits charge a recurring monthly fee because they can. I'm guessing that 99% of "web" merchants aren't very internet savvy (although they should be).

You can build your own and upload it. You can pick from any number of programming books that build a shopping cart as a way to teach you the language. Almost every language has at least one book like this available and you can usually just download the code. Ruby on Rails is probably the quickest implementation that I've ever seen. Slick stuff (I'm curious what the downside is to Ruby though, but that's for another thread).

Your store is usually set up just like you mentioned; a subdomain to your main site. We run ours as the main site though so you can do it either way.

Rick, I'll get back to your PM probably tomorrow. I'm in western Iowa where the three states come together.

Wally

[Buckshot77]

Just bringing this back up for an update. I settled in on Godaddy.com for hosting the site. I was a bit worried about some of the restrictions on other hosting companies and godaddy as well since our site will have some possibly risque material on it (lingerie and a few select "goodies"). I did question godaddy about it and they don't descriminate against adult site hosting as long as you aren't breaking any laws, but they still reserve the right to shut you down if they feel like it. Considering that's about the same as you'll get anywhere, I picked them for the cost versus bandwidth and hosting which I'll probably never come close to using, but at least I've got it if I want it. FYI Silverhorse- EWD specifically excludes any adult content (which I didn't allude to in my original post) so I didn't give them a shot.

As far as the shopping cart goes, I've been playing with x-cart. I don't see where I can go wrong with $199 cost and they offer custom programming to get the templates exactly how we want them and will incorporate all our design work for us. Shoot, they'll even upload and set it up on your hosting site if you want them to. It has a lot of nice functions and the demo is fully interactive letting me actually input new items and set up the store so I can see exactly how the interface works along with acting like a customer to see how it works on their end as well.

I'm still working on finding a credit card processor that I like, but that won't happen until we get down to having out site up and ready to run since they want to actually view the site before approving you for the most part. FYI, for anyone looking for merchant services (creidt card processing, etc), our very own Bart Carter offers that service through his company. I've been working with their manager on our particulars and he's been very helpful.

Rick

[Buckshot77]

Well, onto a secondary update. We've got the site up running and open for orders. It's been that way for over a month now and we really haven't received a single order from a random customer. The only orders we've done are for people we know. In the mean time, we've been working on getting our payment gateway setup so the credit card processing will be automatic. I doubt this is the reason we haven't had any sales since very few people have even started a shopping cart according to my store statistics.

The problem we're running into now is the apparently godaddy keeps their servers locked up tight so the only way to set up a payment gateway is to use a proxy server. Our merchant processor uses Linkpoint as their gateway. The problem is there is a known error between godaddy's proxy server and linkpoint. I'm not very hopeful about getting around this since it seems to be a known problem by my shopping cart people and the gateway people so I'm back to square one looking for hosting. Anyone else using linkpoint specifically as their gateway that can recommend hosting?

Thanks,
Rick

[Buckshot77]

Well, I basically got the big middle finger up the ass from godaddy tech support saying they're not responsible for helping to troubleshoot any thrid party software or scripts though the fault is apparently in their proxy server configuration. I personally have no idea what the hell the problem is, but if the people I've hired to do the install tell me it's a fault with the godaddy stuff, I guess I have to go with them. Any suggestions? I just shot an email back to godaddy suggesting they try to help me or I'll have to request a refund for prepayment on 2 years of hosting plus add-ons.

Rick

[EvolutionMotorsport]

Well, I basically got the big middle finger up the ass from godaddy tech support saying they're not responsible for helping to troubleshoot any thrid party software or scripts though the fault is apparently in their proxy server configuration. I personally have no idea what the hell the problem is, but if the people I've hired to do the install tell me it's a fault with the godaddy stuff, I guess I have to go with them. Any suggestions? I just shot an email back to godaddy suggesting they try to help me or I'll have to request a refund for prepayment on 2 years of hosting plus add-ons.

Rick

GoDaddy is awful. Try Hostway or Dot5. As for shopping carts, try ZenCart. It is free and highly customizable, with some simple PHP programming. Zen is a thread of osCommerce....

Thanks...Mike

[tfalk]

I wouldn't touch Hostways or Ipowerweb... Best suggestion I can give you is find
out who the cart company recommends... might cost you more but at least it should
be a company that they know their software will run on...

[Sean Park]

GoDaddy is awful. Try Hostway or Dot5.

Hostway - overpriced. I started CC on Hostway and the interface back in the day was nice and well set up/easy to use, but the monthly was excessive.

Dot5 - exact opposite. Cheap, online interface has been lacking. My wife set up a site on Dot5 because it was cheap as can be but to renew the domain she had to call in because it wasn't possible to renew online. That could have changed in the last year, but she is handing the site over to someone else and once again, had to call in to prevent auto renewal and take her name/info off the account.

[Buckshot77]

I basically ended up going back into the cart manufacturer's online support forums and looking into their recommended hosts. I'm planning to select from one of these three:
www.ewdhosting.com (mentioned earlier in this thread)
www.handsonhosting.com
www.brillianthost.com

EWD and Handson have both been around a pretty decent amount of time and have good recommendations, but are a bit pricier than Brilliant. Brilliant is the new guy on the block, but knows the cart software, configures his server for it, has cheap pricing with some extras included (like a shared SSL), however his server is housed by another company so he's something of a reseller. Handson keeps a rack of servers specifically for more adult oriented sites which ours would fall into to handle higher traffic volumes. EWD seems to be the most customer oriented as he offers to switch over our hosting for us. I received an email directly back from all 3 within 30 minutes of my first contact at 9PM central time last night which I was impressed with. Any suggestions?

Rick

[Buckshot77]

OK, well I thought I'd post my own little happy dance. We had our first official sale as an e-commerce business today! Hopefully this will start to have things pan out as it's been a long time waiting and checking and hoping for orders to come.

While I'm resurrecting this thread, think we can stick some tech in here on how to advertise on the internet? I've got a few basic ideas, but I'd love some tech on how people actual plan and go about it rather than sticking my nose out there and flushing a couple hundred bucks at a time on search engine submitters, buying keywords, etc. So let's hear it, what have you guys used to get search engine rankings, sales leads, clicks to your sites?

Thanks,
Rick

[Steve Barber]

As for shopping carts, try ZenCart. It is free and highly customizable, with some simple PHP programming. Zen is a thread of osCommerce....

Thanks...Mike

My vote goes for Zen Cart as well. Earlier versions weren't very user friendly, but the most recent have been good. I use Zen Cart hosted by Camelot Hosting (http://www.camelot-hosting.com). Tony at Camelot is very helpful, and extremely knowledgeable about Zen Cart. He has helped me many times when I messed something up trying to customize the cart. He will set up a pre modified Zen Cart with all the good add ons already done for free when you use his hosting.

[racerx7]

anybody try costco?

$18 a month and $20 setup fee. Sounds cheap to me, but it has been a long
time since I priced this kind of stuff.



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[scorreia]

While I'm resurrecting this thread, think we can stick some tech in here on how to advertise on the internet? I've got a few basic ideas, but I'd love some tech on how people actual plan and go about it rather than sticking my nose out there and flushing a couple hundred bucks at a time on search engine submitters, buying keywords, etc. So let's hear it, what have you guys used to get search engine rankings, sales leads, clicks to your sites?

You would be correct about flushing money away using search engine submission services. They are pointless.

I would be concerned about Google ranking and getting the site listed on Yahoo. I have had decent results from Google Ad Words as well.

Google Ranking:
The formula of course is secret and there are no tricks in getting your site ranked, despite what anyone says. The key is relevance, ie how important your site is vs other sites that are similar to yours. Relevance in part is determined by how many other important pages link back to yours. So, the key to making your page more relevant is to get your site link on as many other sites as possible. The more relevant the site your link sits on, the better off you'll be.

The second part is relevant content. Keywords are important, but keywords that relate to the content are even better. Proper use of Heading tags and ALT tags on your images helps as well, as they are part of the magic formula.

I have worked with many companies in online marketing and have discovered that there is no 1 way to do it, a lot of it is industry specific. We had a customer who sells diecast cars and his method consists of the above mentioned Google tips and Ad Words but more importantly, swag, swag and more swag. He goes to trade shows and hands out tons of stuff with his name and logo on it and he gives stuff out to everyone he does business with. He'll stop and talk to someone at the store and end up giving them a hat or something. In his case meat space marketing worked better than any of the online efforts, a point that is all to often overlooked by people starting web businesses.

edit for clarity

[sdumae]

wally8 why should we depend on some internet marketer to promote the thing that we own out... we can promote our own product with the creativity of our own.I meant the product here is the website that you launched.

[URL=*************************************[/URL]

[Sendero]

[QUOTE=sdumae;643916]wally8 why should we depend on some internet marketer to promote the thing that we own out... we can promote our own product with the creativity of our own.I meant the product here is the website that you launched.

earnsidecash.com

For some reason this stinks of spammer.

[gsr20det]

For some reason this stinks of spammer.

Do a search in Google on his user name and the URL he posted and it becomes potted meat product.

[CoochDog]

Looking to move a local club website to a new hosting company as site performance has gone in the crapper over the last 60 days and GoDaddy support suggests "verifying my FTP userid and password are correct" as a possible remedy. :rolleyes:

Major requirements are PHP, MySql, and multiple email address forwarding capabilities (basic standard stuff). Club president is pushing for a Virtual Private Server arrangement, but I don't think that is necessary to get what we need... which is a company that provides reasonably reliable service, can actually support their product, and respond to service requests in an intelligent manner.

I checked out the alternatives listed earlier in this thread, nothing jumped out at me as special. Any new or notable up-and-coming providers since this topic was last visited?

I just took over support of another club's website which is hosted by 1&1. So far, I'm impressed but my experience with them is very short. Anyone have experience with 1&1 hosting (good or bad)? http://www.1and1.com

[ElCaminoGuy]

Anyone have experience with 1&1 hosting (good or bad)? http://www.1and1.com

I'd be interested in opinions, too.

[fspgti]

Damn guys, look at post #6 above. I have had 1and1 for a couple of years, they're fine. The only complaints are really with quality and breadth of the reports. If that doesn't matter, then you should be just fine. Even with this, I really have no reason to switch away from them. I am on the Linux plan now, but I was on the Windows plan which was fine too. I liked folder-level access control with Verve hosting better (point and click) but that again is not a big deal if you don't mind a few extra lines of code, of course.

[CoochDog]

Damn guys, look at post #6 above. .

Totally missed that. :o Thanks for the additional detail of your experience.

Now having supported this inherited site using 1and1 for a bit over a month I can add a bit of feedback based on my personal experience. Tech support appears to be only available via phone. That impressed me. What didn't impress was the obvious off-shore call center picking up on the other end. Virtually worthless beyond recording my issue and giving me a trouble ticket number... no followup at all although the issue was resolved within a couple hours.

[Drew Manzella]

I'll throw out another option:

http://www.karthost.com

I have a fair amount of experience with both their services and the owner, Roy Randolph. His service is top-notch with stellar support. We are gradually moving all of our clients over to his services. I would not hesitate to send anyone his way.

[Mark Worthington]

Of several related threads on c-c.com, I'm bringing this one back up, because it seems most relevant (at least the title is most relevant).

I need a web site and functioning email service for a business I'm in the process of starting up. No online product sales or anything like that, the web site will simply provide information regarding my geothermal business. Obviously, anything I could do to pursuade Google to list it when specific search queries are performed would be nice, but I suggest that's a topic for another thread. Based on what I've read thus far, it seems that GoDaddy is probably my best bet. Is that still true?

I'm a babe in the woods when it comes to this IT stuff, and I understand that GoDaddy has website templates that I can use to get me started. Unfortunately, I don't have the funds to hire someone to take care of this stuff for me. I also have very limited time right now.

Here's what I want in terms of functionality:


access to email (via outlook, webmail, and probably via Blackberry or iPhone in the near future).
Hosting a small, non-e-commerce website.
Reliability.
Did I say cheap?
Bonus points if I can host photos or possible a personal web site on the same account.


I ASSume it would be cheaper, much less labor intensive and more reliable to use a hosting service than it would be to convert a spare PC into a web/mail service which I could plug into my Verizon fios internet connection. True?

Thanks.

[SHOboy]

Mark, do you have any programming experience? HTML is actually pretty easy to hand-code, i.e., you can make a pretty good website with nothing more than NotePad as an editor.

All the stuff you're looking for came with my GoDaddy account. They have some free website editing software as well, but I've never tried it. I hand-code everything, since my stuff is pretty simple.

http://www.ericjacobsen.org

Everything there has been hand-coded for about thirteen years (I don't even remember the first time I put a site up, but it was in the early days of teh intartubes).

You can select View->Source in the menus in IE and see the HTML source code. It's very straightforward to make a simple site if you have any programming experience at all.

[Drew Manzella]

Mark - I PMed you. I do all of the above.

[Rainman]

Did I say cheap?





If that is what you are looking for, I have a neighbor that is just getting started in the web design business. He seems to be working for peanuts. His work looks good to me(as a complete amateur).

I heard him quote a basic, non-web shopping site at 300 dollars yesterday.

Here is an example he whipped up for the neighborhood in that price range.



wwwDOTmcferrinpark.com


His contact info is located there.


Like I said, he is just getting started but I have known him for a while and he is a good guy. A bit quirky and detail oriented but he is honest (and that is becoming more rare all the time).

[Drew Manzella]

wwwDOTmcferrinpark.com
Welcome to hometown.aol.com. Its a good thing he only charges $300.00.

:p