Web Hosting Services?
 

I'm looking at setting up a website for my new business, and have been using GoDaddy's shared web hosting services. Unfortunately, it often takes awhile when the website first loads, although subsequent page loads are much quicker.

I'm thinking about upgrading, but can't seem to find very many legitimate reviews of hosting companies; therefore, I'm throwing the question out to you guys:

What hosting service are you using to host your company's website, and are you happy with them?

Thanks for the help,
Glenn Fisher

Free Web Hosting with PHP, MySQL and cPanel, No Ads is free or try paid hosting at Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, and Dedicated Website Hosting w/ cPanel - HostGator

I use Speed Host and have nothing but good things to say.

Netfirms is my preference. www.Netfirms.com

I have used both shared and dedicated servers with HostGator and have been very happy with them.

I've used services from Media Temple. Great host, technical support responded quickly when issues arose. I'd recommend checking them out.

I've also used 1and1.com. Not as personalized experience as Media Temple, but very stable.

Hosting is kind of like your preference in food..... it depends on what you want. I provide hosting services to small businesses, but my services are not for everyone. If you consider yourself very technically savvy, then you probably don't need my kind of service. I provide a "pick up the phone call" sort of services where my customers don't want to have to know how things work. But for clients that want to be able to call someone and have the problem taken care of, I'm a helpful service.

I have personally worked with clients on GoDaddy, Dreamhost, and Surpass. Surpass provides more powerful features, which is why I recommend them, but for users that don't care about power users features (parking domains, lots of MySQL features, etc) then other hosts like Dreamhost might be good to look into. I do not recommend GoDaddy because everything with them is an up-sell, and it is annoying to deal with.

I'm fortunate to have an office in a business park with a top tier data center where we have collocated servers. Prior to that, we used hosting services from 1&1 (1and1.com). They are very good, and we still keep an account with them for testing. They have hosting starting at $3.99 a month or some unbelievably low price.

I use IXwebhosting.com and have been very happy with their services.

Hey Roger -

I am still perusing for a web host myself and MT came recommended a few times as well as 1&1. My question for you is, are you using a Shared or VPS service with MT? And when you were using 1&1, what service did you use with them Shared or VPS?

Are you able to host your videos on these sites without any problems?

E-commerce?

Also, if you do your own web designing/building, what software do you use / recommend?

We still use 1&1 for a few client sites. Yes, we do host a lot of videos on 1&1 but they are not streaming, but instead progressive download. We do have one client for whom we use the "Beginner eStore" e-commerce hosting. It's capable, but very limited. We use Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 as the development platform, but that's serious overkill if you just want to make a basic site.

Yahoo may not be the greatest, but it's cheap and easy. I made mine and it's working pretty good (surprising since I've never done this before).

Andrew,

At MT we were using VPS not Shared; at 1&1 we had our own dedicated server farm. We did host a some short videos using Silverlight streaming.

By day, I'm a software solution architect and work with mid- to large-businesses, complete with integrations in to backend EPR/SAP systems. So I'm using Microsoft Commerce Server, SharePoint Server, and Visual Studio. For a small site this would definately be overkill.

I'd check out Google Checkout or Paypal for credit card processing. This way you don't have to manage the credit card transaction (and the security involved with accepting credit cards). In a nutshell, you redirect your customer to their site with the shopping cart contents, the user then provides Google/Paypal with the credit card info, once the transaction is complete Google/Paypal sends your web site a special message, and finally the user is redirected back to your site. I've done this for some non-profit orgranizations and it has worked out well.

Second on the Google CO or PayPal
 

I'd also suggest checking out Google Checkout or Paypal for credit card processing. I am a small bis hosting provider and I have implemented an OSS shopping cart system with the PayPal interface for a client and the results worked quite well. As mentioned, this greatly reduces your responsibility for storing & securing credit card transaction information by offloading it to the third party company.

Thanks all for the insight and suggestions. I'll definitely check out the PayPal and Google Checkout options; looks like the easiest and, more importantly, very secure.

Just shopping around right now for:

- A good value, reliable web hosting company

- Some decent software, nothing too fancy as I'm not a code geek by any means. (Some of the software I've heard about, but never have used yet, are: DreamWeaver, Expression, RapidWeaver (I believe this is for Mac's only), Namo WebEditor to name a few)

Also, has anyone heard of or used Homestead?