Hey guys,
I’m looking for some low cost options as far as domain hosting for a small business. I’m looking for something with at least 500 MB of space, support for PHP, MySQL, and Perl/CGI Scripting. I also need about 10 POP3 email accounts for the domain.
Does anyone know of any hosting services with good histories that fit the bill?
Thanks!
You might want to check out Lunar Pages . I have not used them, but I was looking around about six months ago and they worked their way to the top of my list
Hmm… in my own search, I came across this one, as well. Looks like a good choice.
I use ReadyHosting and have done so for several years. So far, so good. My first domain was $100, the others are $50 a year. It’s a great deal for me. I get about 10 GB of traffic on one of the sites (which is a little on the high side, particularly for a “personal” site) and Readyhosting handles it fine.
Mail servers (assuming your business model doesn’t revolve around spam or somesuch) are fairly low bandwidth. If you’ve got a static IP and a domain name registered to it, consider hosting it yourself.
The software I use to do this is from Argosoft: http://www.argosoft.com/, it was more or less trivial to install on an old PC I had lying around, and it’s secure and easy to manage. I’d never done it before, and had it set up and working (even rebuffing spammers trying to relay through it!) in about an hour.
Total cost, not counting the PC is about a hundred bucks (and I think they’ve even got a free version).
The great part is that you then have “infinite” throwaway e-mail addresses. Some irritating web form insists on a valid e-mail to send you a password or something? Create one, get your one-important e-mail, then disable it forever!
You WILL need your upstream ISP to allow the local mail server (and you’ll probably want to send outgoing mail through them), but this is usually not a problem with business accounts. (I didn’t even have to ask, it just worked.)