we4c.com — Sat, 26 Oct 2002 23:01:51 +0000

Do you have a Domain Name selected for the site yet?

skelley1 — Fri, 18 Oct 2002 07:36:04 +0000

First, you cannot tell if this is a good 'value' because you don't really have all the pertinent facts.

What kind of support does this company offer? What control panel is it (Cpanel, Plesk, H-Sphere, etc)?

How much support do you need? I would assume from your question that you've never been hosted before other than maybe free accounts (please don't take that as an insult, it isn't meant to be). For your first account or so, you will want better support. Be very careful in choosing your host. There is a lot to ask them if you are going to trust your mother's business to them.

Do you need that much space at first? I seriously doubt you will be making a site that will require 100mb or 3G xfer, considering the type it will be. You may be able to start with a smaller account with a better host or reseller.

Don't worry about the options. You don't have to use them all. They will be enough for what you need.

We cannot answer as to whether or not there are better hosts available if we don't know who your host is. If your answer is, "are there cheaper hosts?" then the answer is, "yes." Do you want to use them, "NO."

You will almost definitely only need Linux hosting. It can be argued that Linux is more stable and more secure than Windows.

What kind of internet connections do they have (internap, cogent, etc)? How much do they oversell their disk space and xfer? How many other clients are on your server?

Ther are a LOT of kids who open up hosting businesses out there. Their only business plan is to make a few bucks and then do some other stuff. Don't expect them to be there next year.

You could get your domain name yourself anywhere from about $8.00/yr to $35/yr (USD) depending on who you go with. Make sure that you are the person who owns the domain name and completely controls it in case you decide to move. I would suggest that you do it yourself (it is very easy) and negotiate a better price.

Just so you know, I own my own servers and have resellers and hosted accounts directly under me. I'm not here to get clients, however, just to see what's going on in the webmaster world, and to get some help with my own web design skills. That's why you don't see my contact information I would be happy to give you some opinions about hosting and hosts, tho.

mairving — Wed, 16 Oct 2002 17:35:20 +0000

I would be very careful for someone that includes domain registration in the price. The question that you have to ask is who actually owns the domain. Some hosts will offer free domain registration but register the domain name in their name. If you want to change hosts, then you have to pay an exorbitant fee to them. Find out what is extra also. What happens when you exceed your bandwidth or if you need a MySQL database and how much?

zollet — Wed, 16 Oct 2002 17:13:24 +0000

i) In my opinion, you can just go just by the features offered because quality of support, uptime, etc also make a lot of difference.

ii) As Megan mentioned, those features are pretty standard.

iii) Again, if they provide good support, have good speed/uptime and not overloaded servers, then you might even say they're cheap.

iv) Megan covered this one as well. I would like to add that I suggest you go with Linux unless you need features like ASP, ODBC, CF, MS SQL, etc.. Linux is a lot better for Perl/CGI, PHP, MySQL, HTML and so on.

If you don't mind, feel free to let us know what web host you're thinking about signing up with and maybe some of us knows anything about them.

Either way, I wish you the best.

Megan — Wed, 16 Oct 2002 14:09:29 +0000

i) Looks like it - that's pretty much within the range of what most hosts are charging I think.

ii) Those options look pretty standard to me. You probably won't find a lot of packages that don't include those extras, and you may want to take advantage of them in the furture.

iii) Hard to say without knowing more about the company (i.e. are they reliable? is the customer service good? how is the control panel? These are the sort of extras you should be concerned about)

iv) It really comes down to whether or not you want to use higher end windows programming languages (such as ASP) in the future.