I’ve been using Powweb, and I’m underwhelmed. Any suggestions on good places to register a domain and get hosting?
(I sell baby slings, and I’m going to be branching out to various other baby products.)
Thanks!
As far as a domain name goes, most people seem to recommend GoDaddy for its reliability and portability.
That’s all the advice i can give, but i’ll be keeping an eye on this thread because i, too, am in the market for a host.
I’ve used godaddy since about April with no trouble at all. Their tech service (the one time I needed it) was superb, and their rates are extremely cheap. Also they just increased their storage and bandwidth tenfold; my account (the cheapest they offer, $3.95/month) was originally 500MB storage and 25GB bandwidth per month, and they just upped it to 5GB storage/250GB bandwidth.
Others have reported having trouble with them, but I’m an extremely satisfied customer. Here is the page that lists their service plans.
I recently had a client who was considering GoDaddy to host a commercial site, but had to turn it down because their server software (most notably PHP and Apache) were rather dated and wouldn’t support the software she wanted to run. My secondhand impression from other folks was that GoDaddy was certainly affordable, but really bad at the customer service/maintenance side of the fence.
I have run a successful commercial website for over five years.
I have experienced the gamut of web hosting companies from the truly atrocious to average to good to excellent.
At the moment, my vote goes to Netpivotal. An excellent, successful, well-run and dependable company who have been around a while and look set for a steady, successful future. Very helpful, knowledgeable and swift technical support. Good prices, very competitive but not stupidly cheap (which would be a sign of zero quality of service). Good service attitude characterised by ‘let’s get it right first time’ and ‘let’s help the customer, that way we might keep the customer, get good word-of-mouth and grow this business’. A very good ‘back end’ admin panel for controlling your site and carrying out various admin duties. Friendly attitude, but efficient with it.
Easily the best web hosting company I know of, and I know of quite a few!
People I’ve helped with this sort of thing have had great experiences with cheap $3-10 GoDaddy accounts. As mentioned, they just upped all the stats so you get a lot for that price. The one downside I’ve noticed is that their free stats package kind of sucks, so if you care about analyzing your traffic, you may want to shell out an extra $3/month or so for the upgraded stats.
Personally, I manage a lot of different sites, so I use a GoDaddy virtual dedicated server account (which gives me root access on my own “virtual” server such that I can install and upgrade whatever software I want as though it were a dedicated machine). I’m paying $35/month plus $5/month for the Plesk Control Panel, which makes it really easy to administer multiple domains, configure virtual hosting, create new ftp accounts with chroot jails, manage dns zone records, etc. If I wanted to, I could easily turn around and sell hosting accounts to other people to recoup my monthly cost. The only major downside is that my VDS is running Fedora Core 2 Linux, which is kind of dated. Still, I haven’t had trouble running the apps I’ve wanted to run (Ruby, Rails, Mailman, MoinMoin, etc.). I just end up building most of them from source instead of grabbing RPMs.
All of my customer service / support experiences with both types of GoDaddy accounts have been good (i.e. fast response time, problem resolved). That’s pretty important to me because I’ve been frustrated in the past by inconsistent service from smaller “basement” companies like WebAppCabaret, etc, where customer service and availability seem to deteriorate over time.