Web site hosting choice

self | Monterrosa

[Monterrosa-24]

FRiends, I need to tap Freeper expertise. My little business needs a web site and I was wondering what my FR comrades thought of godaddy.com, domain.com, wikihow.com, namecheap.com and any other web-hosting sites that folks may have experienced.

I have a storefront coffee and chocolate shop and I'm thinking of adding shipping to our gift basket offers. Our business is very new and small but we have some great lines of Belgium chocolate and value-packed gift baskets with teas, coffees, chocolates, and premium cookies.

[cynwoody]

Where you register your domain name and where you host your site are separate issues, although the same companies often offer both services and will try to up-sell you from registration to hosting. But you should decide independently.

DNS is normally handled by the hosting provider. But you can do that separately, as well. E.g., in our case, we have multiple locations. Only our main (www) site is at FutureQuest. We have other locations (e.g., you could have an Atlanta office reachable via atlanta.example.com and hosted right on the Atlanta office's main server). This is handy for running VPNs and such between locations. Ask your prospective hosting provider for advice if you such a requirement.

We've been using FutureQuest for the last eight years. We don't have a shopping cart function, but you should be able to set one up there.

[Jeff Chandler]

A transaction fee for what?

With their entry level service, they charge 3% of every purchase on top of whatever the merchant account or PayPal charges.

[Jeff Chandler]

Where you register your domain name and where you host your site are separate issues, although the same companies often offer both services and will try to up-sell you from registration to hosting. But you should decide independently. DNS is normally handled by the hosting provider. But you can do that separately, as well. E.g., in our case, we have multiple locations. Only our main (www) site is at FutureQuest. We have other locations (e.g., you could have an Atlanta office reachable via atlanta.example.com and hosted right on the Atlanta office's main server). This is handy for running VPNs and such between locations. Ask your prospective hosting provider for advice if you such a requirement.

This is far too much technology for a merchant this size to worry about.

Keep it simple and focus on what you do best.

[EternalVigilance]

Not if you don’t use their storefront service. It’s pathetic anyway.

Again, it all depends on what a person wants and needs.

If they have money to spend on the project, by all means, hire a professional like yourself.

Folks just need to be very careful in hiring someone to build them a site, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Price and actual service rendered varies wildly, as do the costs for upkeep.

[Jeff Chandler]

hire a professional like yourself.

I just suggested bypassing the professional and using a hosted service costing 15 bucks a month.

[EternalVigilance]

Great!

[JoeRed]

I always got better service (faster page loads and less down time) from FatCow than from GoDaddy. It’s been a while, though. Maintaining a viable website is very time consuming. Not only do they need to be constantly optimized for page ranking, they need to be able to function properly across multiple changing platforms (windows, ios, android) and display properly on multiple devices (laptop, tablet, cellphone) in different browsers (internet explorer, chrome, Firefox, etc). Sorry, I don’t mean to rain on your parade. Just sayin’ its not nearly as simple as it used to be.