Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I was just browsing through the hundreds of hosting services out there and wanted to get your take on the best one in terns of features, support, value, etc.

What are you guys using?  Are you guys happy with your service?

Post your reviews!

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calvin1214@hotmail.com

What sort of features / functionality do you need?
  e-mail?
  ftp?
  secure web site?
  database?
  shopping cart?

I`ve been using DreamHost (dreamhost.com) for almost 3 years and I have been happy with them.  There shared hosting plans are inexpensive and offer lots of features.  I like their web control panels for maintaining email accounts and other settings.

Their support is by email and usually happens within a few hours.

Disclaimer: I`m pretty technical and can handle debugging problems.  My tolerance for glitches may be higher or lower than someone elses.

p.s.  If you do choose DreamHost, you can mention my name ("brade") and I will get a referral award.  Likewise, if you refer others to DreamHost, you can get a referral award.

The type of hosting that you need will depend on several factors. If you plan on having a dynamic website with changing content, databases, a forum, user accounts for shopping or storage of other info then you need probably a dedicated server that will be designated just for your website. Such servers can run on Microsoft or Linux. From personal experience I preferer Linux based hosting as it is less expensive and more reliable, but it is more technical; thus, the web design will be more advanced in terms of programming. Morosoft based servers are more expensive and lesss reliable compared with Linux.
If you think that the website will have a heavy usage right from the start then the bandwith will also play a role when choosing the hosting plan. As more users access the site, the hosting plan will need to include enough power to handle all the usage in order to keep the site running without going down.




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Calvin,
There are lots of hosting companies that offer web hosting these days, what you need to decide is how much space do you need? what features do you want? For example: Shopping Cart support, Coldfusion support, php, ASP, ASP.Net. Do you want blogging software such as PhPBB, Mambo? Do you want Linux based or Windows based? Do you want FTP and Anonymous FTP? Do you want Email? How many MySQL Databases are they offering you. ODBC support, What bandwidth are they offering you? Are they 99.9 % up-time? make sure they have good technical support and prompt response. These are some of the things you should look for.  

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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

That all sounds great .... but to most ... what the heck did you just say? I think you lost our original poster ... and 75% of everyone else by being soooooo technical?

Again, this is not a personal attack ... but this is where a "total turn-key" solution might be needed.

Prior to what server to host with, the real question is ...

1. Why do you think you need a web site?
2. What exactly do you wish to do with the web site? E-Commerce, Informational Site, Blog-sphere, ect.?
3. Are you going to "hack" your way through designing a site ... or do you realize that this venture is best left to true professionals?

Once you have addressed those 3 questions ... then you start to look for true professionals that can show you variances in what you wish to do.

Siince I`m familiar with E-Commerce, there are many questions to ask yourself, and your team, prior to even looking for yur "web design team".

1. Are we going to carry inventory ... or are we going to drop-ship?
2. How are we going to handle fulfillment, if we are going to cary inventory?
3. Will we charge for S/H?
4. What will be our return policy?
5. Are we willing to invest in a merchant account .. or are we simply going to use PayPal? If we use PayPal exclusively, what are the draw back?
6. How are we going to market / merchandise our site and products?
7. What budget do we have for web design? Marketing expenses? Monthly expense, ie. hosting fees, gateway fees, ect?
8. Are we going to carry just a few items ... or ... will our on-line store be growing over the next few months, yrs?
9. How do we handle an "out of stock" or "temporaliy discontinued" within our data base / store?
10. How will we handle a "back ordered" item?
11. Are we interested in offering gift certicates/gift cards? If so, do you have any ideas on how that might work? Who you will market them to ... general public, businesses?
12. How are you going to survive financially till the on-line store starts to support itself, as well as you?

Whew ... once you`ve gone through that exercise ... now you just might be ready to start to look at "web design teams" ... the hosting bit is easy ... its all the other stuff (work) you need to do prior, that is the REAL IMPORTANT STUFF.

IMHO, if you don`t do the "homework" stuff first ... you are destined to fail.

TJG,
Please read carefully, what is so hard or technical about the answer? If you can`t understand what I wrote on my last posting, then most-likely you have go-daddy as your web hosting provider. You don`t know what how much space do you need? "S-P-A-C-E" you don`t know what space is? I`m pretty sure he knows the difference between Linux and Windows. Do you know the difference? Or are you a MAC user?
What about the word shopping cart? how much more descriptive can it get? Blogging where is the technical part?

Calvin you do you know what`s the difference between coldfusion, php, asp, and asp.net are? if you don`t these are server side software that lets you connect Databases to your web site,also known as server side scripting software. Let`s take for example Start Up nation is asp. the difference if you are going to have asp or asp.net depends on the package you choose and if you go with windows hosting then you will have asp and asp.net other than that if you go with Linux then you won`t have them, but you will have php and coldfusion if they offer coldfusion, So basically it`s is up to you Calvin. Uptime means reliability of the server, FTP is short for file transfer protocol, you will use this to upload your web site to your web hosting. Anonymous FTP, well that is incase you want to share files with clients and friends and want fast down-load. ODBC is short for Open Database Connection which lets you connect to the database of your choice and if you are running a database driven web site, (dynamic) you will need to register your database. And TJG, do you know what email is or should I go into detail, for sake of this conversation email is a program used to send letters, documents via the internet. Calvin I hope this helps you, and TJG I hope this help you out too

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Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net

hi i am here to add my hosting experience .i got the best linux hosting service from
this site xnynz.com here they provide free hosting service for each paid domain that we buy from them .
they also render paid hosting service.i hosted large amount of my domains here , i choose ultimate plan hosting
for hosting my sites for which they provide me the following offers they are

ultimate plan:
Unlimited Space+ & Bandwidth!
1000 Email Accounts2
Unlimited MySQL Databases
here we can Enhance our site with today's hottest hosting applications and utilities.

 

 

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I've been using Wordpress for my websites (I really only need wordpress because I do not sell ecommerce anymore).

Anyway, I don't believe that if you don't do all of your homework you're destined to fail.  You can always switch hosts if one proves to suck.  

I have been hosting with bluehost for the past year.  They have continuously blown me away with their customer support.  They have 99.9% uptime which I monitor with Binary Canary and they have unlimited storage for like $5/month.  I have been very happy.

 

For ecommerce, I had used Shopify for the platform and hosting.  They have a number of different packages but I found their back end system much more user friendly than Magento or ANY custom ecommerce back end I had ever created before. 

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To play the SEO game safely, I recommend using only a few-to-none cross-links. I am saying this because I have seen my organic engine rankings suffer after my cross-linked sites were shut down at the same hosting company for about eight hours straight. I suspect my sites were penalized because the engines found out I was cross-linking using too many different keyword phrases as my backlink titles.

Three weeks after slowly removing 90% of my cross-links, I noticed an improvement in organic rankings. Now I have no plans on going back to excessive cross-links.

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