Flutterby™! : Apropos of nothing 2001-12-10 02:04:07+00

Apropos of nothing

2001-12-10 02:04:07+00 by Dylan 16 comments

Can anyone recommend a good web hosting company that provides the following?

CHEAP
Large storage allowance
Decent, but not necessarily stellar, bandwidth.

The reason I ask is that my mother's sort of actually making a go of making a living as an artist, and she feels she wants to have an internet presence to expand her market outside her local (college town in Iowa) area. I'm going to do the site for her, but need someplace to put it.

Essentially it'll be a lot of images in some kind of thumbnail script, along with a small database of some kind for processing orders. (I really haven't decided on this yet...in any case, it'll be a challenge...I'm totally new to database development). I'm going to set her up with PayPal for the payment section of the fun unless someone here decries PayPal for some reason.

Oh, also...I've never really tried to "market" a site before, if anyone has any tips for getting the site into the search engines, without resorting to putting "horny asian fisting monkey cheerleader barely legal horse sex fuck" into the meta tags, I'd appreciate it.

Anyway, if anybody knows of some good hosts that would be able to provide the kind of service a *small* business needs, let me know.

Cam likes Pair. They're definitely not Highertech in terms of available bandwidth, but they are cheap, and seem to be moderately reliable.

I've been using Verve for my personal sites since September, and haven't had any complaints so far. Although I should note that I haven't tried using the database or shopping cart capabilities they offer, pretty much confining myself to keeping a diary, so I can't vouch for those particular features.

What I can vouch for is that they let me point three separate domain names at different directories at a relatively cheap price, which was the main thing I was looking for; that when I had a bit of trouble setting that up, their customer service representative replied to my e-mail very quickly and got everything running smoothly; and that the site's been working just fine since then.

Pair is OK if you never ever need to get human intervention. and if the site gets popular, get ready for extra bandwidth charges. They are also very insecure, you can browse others directories via FTP (including shopping cart script output) and have some other fun.

As a 'friend of flutterby', I'd setup a basic 'cybrmall.com' shopping art system and host it for 20 per month. Bad implemementations include dacus.com, and a decent one is changedlives.org. It'll let you upload a decent sized image, automagicaly create thumbnails and medium sized images, all through a web interface. Credit cards processing (the real stuff) can be added later.

Other cheap hosting companies colo'd at HTS: www.siteplus.com, www.hostlocus.com

I vouch for SitePlus. They host three of my domains and if something bad happens, Jim will call and give you a heads up. Highly recommended.

I have had stellar experiences with Hurricane Electric (www.he.net). They have a cheap pricing scheme and are very geek oriented. plus their tech support continually amazes me.

I had an email problem in Feb. Called HE tech support, phone was answered on the second ring by someone who fixed my problem in 30 seconds. It was breathtaking.

As an alternative, I have been reading Paul Graham's writings about his experiences with writing Yahoo store. It sounds like an interesting product that may do everything you need with very little programming.

Todd had a bunch of stuff with Hurricane Electric for a while. When I was on the admin list for those domains I got copious amounts of email from them, enough that it was annoying (although in the current rush of spam I doubt that it'd even register...).

Obviously my first choice for hosting is Highertech.net (and yes, I'm biased, bite me!), I didn't know that SitePlus and HostLocus were on that bit of the network, but that instantly makes those more appealing.

I like Hurricane (he.net). I've been using them for about five years now and currently have three sites running on their servers. Good people, reliable service, geek friendly. Check 'em out.

Yup I had excellent service with Hurricane Electric. Their colo facility is across the street from mae-west, so the few times I couldn't connect there the net was seriously FUBAR. Their tech support was good but sometimes unable to help with complex problems. They have kind of a screwy setup for MySQL which I thought was too limiting. highertech.net is the only ISP I like better. I used to give Dan a hard time about parking his box on the other side of the country but the uptime speaks for it's self.

I have two sites hosted by affordablehost.com, and can recommend them very highly. A sort of a mom-and-pop operation in western Michigan, very friendly folks. Decent bandwidth, good prices, excellent support, if necessary.

heh - I like the Related Topics above. Anyway, I'll plug Digital-Mission, a small colo facility based in the Pittsburgh area that I use a single machine and a number of domains. drop a line to sales@digital-mission.com (you'll probably get mark or rob, both of whom are awesome). Don't use digitalmission.com (note the lack of hyphen) - that's a different group.

I'll throw in a third for pair.com. I signed up my first domain with them nearly five years ago and I'm hosting about a dozen there now.

I'm still happy with them and their associated registration service at pairnic.com. As always, they're great, so long as you don't ever need phone support--they don't do that. They're fairly prompt about getting back to me via email, though.

I don't know if this makes any difference, but Jerry Pournelle's site is hosted by Pair and says good things about them....aside from the rare mail problems.

Actually, Pair now does provide phone support for the higher-level accounts, and is experimentally offering it to webmaster-level customers for free this month (http://www.pair.com/pair/specials/).

Anyhow. 'nother vote for Pair. When I need help, I've generally gotten it within a reasonable time from their e-mail-based support staff.

Take a look at SkyNetWeb, if you know what you're doing they kick ass on colo's.