Recommend a Site Host for Personal - Small Business?

Puddleglum

[Puddleglum]

Hi,

My wife and I are biz-comm and tech writers who are thinking of starting a freelance business. We want to set up our own website with some basic information, plus register a domain name. Has anyone had good experience and would recommend a site host? Any that sound too good to be true that you'd advise we avoid?

[Puddleglum]

Thanks in advance,

'Glum

[ecurbh]

I have two sites hosted with http://srlhosting.com/ and am very happy so far. Very reasonable rates and excellent support. This is the first place I have hosted where you get to the know the support staff on a first-name basis. I highly reccommend them. There is a forum on their site where you can talk to other users, get support, or ask questions before you sign up.

[Jen]

I've used Global Internet Solutions for almost a year and am pleased with the service and price.

[spectr17]

One web hosting company I can recommend that is fairly cheap in cost is Alphaomegahosting. They have great website hosting and their customer service has been outstanding. They helped me move our old forum over and installed the new forum for me. Danny is the owner and he is a good guy. If you're looking for a small website for yourself to put pics on they have a great $4.95 month special which gives you 100 megs of storage and 5 gigs of transfer. If you need more room they have several other plans for bigger needs.

http://www.alphaomegahosting.com/

[Puddleglum]

Thanks for the recommendations, everyone. I'll be checking in on these in the coming week.

[evilC]

http://www.dr2.net/
and
http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/

Both are reasonably priced and give you most of the "widgets" you might need; cgi access, PHP, Perl, SQL databases, sub-domains, unlimited pop accounts (and a web mail interface) and control over things like .htaccess, robots.txt file custom error pages. DR2.net even allows you run cron jobs (not sure if TotalChoice does).

Both use cpanel (a graphical system) to control your account although you have FTP access as well. Neither give you shell access as standard but will for a small one time charge.

I have been happy with both for sites I have hosted on them. Bear in mind they are fairly low traffic sites, so I can't speak to how they would handle higher traffic.

With both you have a lot of control over your webspace and should be able to host even complex sites with scripting and databases etc.

For domain registration http://www.godaddy.com/ are reasonably priced and seem reliable.

I am not affiliated or a reseller for any of these companies.

[ThePythonicCow]

There are alot of web hosts out there -- and your needs may vary much from those above responding to your query. Time to Google. I found the following within a click or two of the Google search for "best web host":

1. BestWebhostingReviews
2. WebHostDirectory
3. TopHosts.com
4. Webhosting-Reviews
5. 10Best Web Hosting Services.

[Puddleglum]

I guess I should say that by small business, I mean really small! My wife and I have several years of experience as technical/business writers, docs designers etc and are just interested in testing the freelance waters. We might create and maintain a small website to see what demand there is and show off our portolios, etc.

Again, thanks all for the web host leads. I guess my main criteria in a web host are these:

• Affordable
• some active server features
• domain name registration
• whatever else I learn is important as I browse these sites

Next I'll be scouring the thread to find out about the possible pitfalls of running a small business. Right now I'm just at the data-gathering stage for all of this, but with a lot of curiosity and enthusiasm.

-'Glum

[Puddleglum]

PS - as you can tell from my posts, my wife usually does the proof-reading...