I am looking to venture out and start my own website. I will be doing this with a couple of friends, but we are still on the planning stage. I would like to know who has made their own website and who they use as a host. I would also like to know how much it costs per month to use them as a host and how much bandwidth you get.
As far as domain goes, what is the best suffix to use? .com, .net, .biz, .us, etc?
For business solutions, what software do you recommend for a sales website…I want to keep track of sales, customers, inventory, shopping cart, and the like. I also need some sort of payment plan like paypal.
I will paypal the doper with the best answer $15 for his time and research…THANKS
Domain Registration - The cheapest, fastest, and best way to register a domain name (.com, .net, .org, etc) is to use http://www.godaddy.com They have been the #1 Internet Register for several years now, and they currently have a .com domain sale for $7.50/yr. What a deal!
Merchant Account (Credit Card Processing) - I’ve used (2) different systems, both worked just fine. http://www.SkipJack.com and http://www.Authorize.net You will have to look around and see what fits you best, what discount rate each place charges, and whether you want support for American Express/Discover cards as well. (Most Merchant Accounts simply use VISA/Mastercard, and support for other cards is extra)
I have used www.webhostxl.com for two sites.
On one site the server is fine.
On the other site a different server just suuuuuuuuuuucked (was down for a month with no answers to any of their 24/7 support lines), so I move that domain to a different host in Australia where I could physically go to their office and beat them up if necessary.
You will need to do research to find the plan that suits you. Generally less , less space and bandwidth, more , more space and more bandwidth.
I also use osCommerce from www.oscommerce.com which is a neat open source shopping cart with built in interfaces to a number of CC providers and also includes a payment gateway to PayPal.
If you can get the .com name, go for it. The rest are not yet memorable enough. If I only know the company name, I would try .com first if I wanetd to find their site. If I couldn’t find it as .com, I would probably move on to a different business.
I forget what I pay, but it’s nice and cheap, $17 or $18 a month for 200 megs of space and 10 gigs of bandwidth. In addition to having some wonderful feature rich utilities (they have a search engine submitter which makes things nice and easy for example), they have 24/7 support, and are a pleasure to deal with.
I use a small company called Suite Net. Their website is ugly and they don’t explain anything at all on their website, but whenever I’ve needed to call or email, I deal with the owner directly. Bandwidth is “unlimited” but it’s not really ever the case. I’ve never gotten dinged for bandwidth charges, but I link to my downloads on my Comcast or .Mac space just in case.
I think I pay $120/year including domain registration (in my name, not theirs) via OpenSRS for 100 megs of space (all I need) and POP mail – I don’t know how many accounts; I just have it all dumped into a single POP box for my own convenience. Oh, yeah, I use SquirrelMail that I installed when I’m at work, so I guess you’re not limited just to POP3.
The owner says most people ask for something called a “FrontPage” server, so I know it’s available. I never was asked originally, but I’m lucky enough to have ended up and a Linux server which gives me ssh shell access, PHP, mySQL, and all the good stuff that’s vastly better than FrontPage. I imagine there’s other stuff, too, but I don’t use it myself so just don’t know. Oh, yeah, it’s Apache, so you can use all of the good stuff that .htaccess allows you to do.
My domain is balthisar.com. I don’t make nor ask for money there – I just give away software, but despite that it’s full-featured and probably as close to “commercial quality” as you can get considering the engine I’m using, which is designed more for blog-style sites.
Tell you what – if I do win, I’ll let you keep the $15 if you can tell me where the bug is that causes Microsoft Internet Explorer to render my pages horribly when running in Windows. Every other browser works perfectly, so so far I’ve just ignored the MSIE users. Hmmm… a quick check indicates it’s 46% of my users – maybe I ought to look into it closer…
My hosting plan lets me STORE 1GB of data on my server, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited email accounts, unlimited FTP accounts. I get 25 GB monthly transfer, Fantastico installer (for shopping carts, forums, bulletin boards, auctions, etc) and a nice CPanel.
It’s only $69.95 YEARLY! What a stinkin deal!
Then at GoDaddy.com, my domain registration was only $7.50 each, so my rough total to run my business a year online is only $100 or so! That’s cheap! I’m quite happy with the prices they have, super competitive.
Hmmm… this actually fixed a problem I didn’t know I had! And % is legal, stupid Microsoft…
In any case, no, the real problem is nothing word wraps and goes way, way, off the right side of the screen. And only on Internet Explorer on Windows as far as I can tell. Internet Explorer on the Mac is fine! Heck, every broswer I’ve tried on Linux/Mac/Windows works fine but for MSIE 6.
Your best choice, providing that you have the technical know-how (or access to it), is to host it yourself. A small *nix server costs you just the hardware, because *nix is free. You get all the toys to play with (e.g. PHP, Perl, and mySQL./postgresSQL), and you get ultimate control over it.
It worked wonders, but I don’t know why. Using % with “text-indent” is perfectly correct CSS2, and even Microsoft’s standard says it is. This is pretty embarassing considering one of the things I distribute on my website is a friggin’ CSS2 editor!
Do any of these mentioned web hosting sites (or any web hosting sites in general) have the capability to keep the owner of the site anonymous to visitors?
I’m thinking of hosting a site which will have some controversial material. I don’t want any of the reactionary cuckoos to find out my real identity. I don’t want them to spam my personal email account, call me at home, cause trouble at work, or drive by my place in a black Edsel showering my house with bullets from a submachine gun.
The only thing that lets people know who owns what site is the domain name registration records. As far as I know, web hosting companies won’t give your info away, and they probably can’t do it even if they wanted to.
If you register a domain name at godaddy.com, you can have your listing “private” for a small fee. That way none of your info shows up during a WHOIS query.
