Web Hosting Services?

[lindaetterlee]

I am looking for a good web hosting service. I am starting a business in Real life (gifts and junk), wanting to take it online. Anyone have any ideas of good providers with decent cost?

[BlueSoup]

godaddy.com isn't bad.  In my very limited experience. 

[Ancient Sim]

I use http://www.hostnexus.com and I've always been very pleased with them.  Their servers are right at the top in terms of speed and they're very reasonably priced.  The staff are also extremely helpful and they have an automatic help chat thingy that's manned most of the time. 

[Paperbladder]

I use http://www.addyour.net, it has 500MB of Storage, 5GB Monthly Transfer, 5 MySQL Databases for free.  It lacks a domain name and I believe there are ads but it's free.  You might not want to use it if you're using the site for business though.

WARNING:I've never actually tried these services, so they could be terrible.
There's NearlyFreeSpeech.net which where you supposedly only pay for the bandwidth your site uses instead of a flat rate per month, according to them 74% of the people that use their service pay less than $1.00 a month.  BugMeNot is hosted by these guys.  You'd probably still have to register a domain name at GoDaddy or something if you use this service.

The second one I saw was [http://www.dreamhost.com]DreamHost[/url] which gives 20GB of storage and 2TB Bandwidth a month for $10, but when I googled "Dream Host" the page showed up with quite a few bad reviews.  In the past they supposedly got an "F" from the BBB, but they've got "C" now.  BBB Company Profile.

There's also LunarPages which gives 5GB of storage and 400GB of Bandwidth for $7 a month, but they've got some bad reviews like DreamHost.  I don't know what their rating was in the past, but they've got an "A" now from the BBB.  BBB Company Profile.

[TaWanda]

You might try http://jaguarpc.com/
My daughter has used them since January and says they are great.The one time they had aproblem they e-mailed her and handled it very professionally. She was quite pleased.

[Brynne]

I use Lunarpages, and am quite happy with it.

[chickengirl]

WARNING:I've never actually tried these services, so they could be terrible.
There's NearlyFreeSpeech.net which where you supposedly only pay for the bandwidth your site uses instead of a flat rate per month, according to them 74% of the people that use their service pay less than $1.00 a month.  BugMeNot is hosted by these guys.  You'd probably still have to register a domain name at GoDaddy or something if you use this service.

I use NearlyFreeSpeech. My website is pretty small and costs me something on the order of a penny every couple of days. You can register a domain name through NFS. After you open an account, you put money in it, and they take money from it a penny at a time according to your usage ($1/GB of traffic and $0.01/MB/month for storage). If your account runs dry, your site is deactivated and you have a month to put more money in. There are no overage charges. I'd recommend them to anyone.

[J. M. Pescado]

godaddy.com isn't bad.  In my very limited experience. 

Godaddy is a DNS registrar, not a hosting service, no? They also have strange billing issues which disagreed with my Paypal thing, and kept trying to weasel credit card numbers out of me. I became suspicious so stopped using them.

[dizzy]

Godaddy offers cheap shared hosting and has been notorious for alleged draconian anti-spam tactics.

[J. M. Pescado]

Godaddy offers cheap shared hosting and has been notorious for alleged draconian anti-spam tactics.

...I'm not sure how those relate. Why would webpages have anything to do with spam? And how would an anti-spam tactic be more draconian than letting you talk to a very badly broken mail daemon that takes half an hour to finally decide that a temporary error occurred, please try again later?

[dizzy]

It's all very complicated and I don't remember the details right. 

I've never run a web site before so I have no idea how it would work, either.

[Jysudo]

I am a bit surprised no one mentioned Yahoo Small Business. It has 5GB for storage and 200GB transfer per month for about $12. I didn't see such an offer elsewhere.
Their support should be pretty ok too. I never used it myself though.

[liegenschonheit]

I've used both Lypha and Godaddy, as well as briefly using yahoo premium hosting.

Lypha is excellent, has great tools and user interface, and is reasonably priced. There are a lot of package options, and the support staff are pretty quick when you need them. I had a few instances where the servers went down, but nothing too major.

Godaddy is the one I currently use. It has less tools and options than Lypha, but for me it is more cost effective (it's pretty cheap). Support responds quickly to trouble tickets. I've also never had the server go down, that I can recall. I get 5GB storage and 250GB bandwidth for about $4 a month, give or take. Unlike Pescado, I've never had any billing issues with them from either credit card or paypal payments.

Don't use yahoo/geocities. It's bad, has limited tools, and is far too expensive for what little you get.

Of course, none of my experiences were with business accounts that required shopping carts or credit card processing. I suggest talking to someone who has experience with that sort of thing and finding out what services you'll need, then shopping around for the best package.

[PattyB]

I'm using bluehost.com for my personal site (non sims related). I'm happy with them.

[notveryawesome]

I use Hosting Revolution http://hostingrevolution.com for my webhosting needs. They have a plan that costs only $10 per YEAR that includes lots of features you'd only expect from higher-priced hosting services, such as unlimited email accounts.

For domain registration I use GoDaddy, but beware that 'automatic renewel' is a misnomer, meaning that if you have your account(s) set up to 'automatically' renew at the end of the term (a year or two, depending on what you've purchased), it does not 'automatically' renew, and you lose your domain name. Fortunately, this only happened with a non-crucial website that I was considering cancelling anyway, but it could be a real problem for a business. Now I know not to disregard the 'your account will expire in X number of days and you must renew your account immediately' emails. Otherwise, I've been very happy with GoDaddy...