posted on December 23, 2000 09:15:09 PM
Who do you use and why?
I finally got tired of the 15MB free sites and decided to switch to a pay site for reliability and more picture hosting and after much research I finally signed up at
Pair.com http://www.pair.com/
I didn't want a lot of bells and whistles, just space for my pictures. I got an FTP acount for $4.95 a month which includes 50MB of dish space and 1 mailbox I won't use.
After a 24% discount for signing up for one year it cost $48.94 which is $4.07 a month. If you are looking for something reliable at a discount you may want to check it out.
If anyone has a better deal let me know. I'm always looking at ways to save.
BTW I am not in any way connected to Pair.com except as a paying user.
posted on December 23, 2000 09:22:34 PM
I use cybrmall.net but my needs are a bit more demanding than yours. I program in Miva, so needed a webhost that had the Miva engine.
I have just about unlimited everything for $20 a month.
So far they have been great.
I've been thinking of writing my own auction management script in Miva, but I don't think I have the time right now...
They have much more to offer than what I signed up for. I have no idea what the cost would be for what your needs are but they claim to be one of the biggest providers on the internet.
I'm just a small fry that needs enough apace to hold all my pictures without having to constantly add and remove them to have enough space. 15MB wasn't enough. 50MB should be more than i'll ever need.
posted on December 24, 2000 06:10:23 AM
I pay 8.95/mo. for 25MB, domain name services, 1 email (that is incredibly flexible in its abilities) plus all the extra features that you need to develop a great web site. I've been with them about 5 months now, and what I am most pleased about is the reliability and speed of this service.
posted on December 24, 2000 06:36:39 AM
Fortunately our ISP provides lots of extra space, and we have 3 local ISP accounts, and then have 2 large Web Sites, which we use some of that space for holding pictures, normally have about 1500 pictures holding on line.
Cost is not as big an issue to me as reliability and up time. One of our web site hosts is Webcom.com; where we have had a large commercial site for 4 plus years, and only had one down day in all that time.
I have checked out many of the less costly site hosts, but they were too new, with too little information on them to see how reliable they would be so we prefer to stay with a proven winner like Webcom.com and Verio-Webcom. We pay about $20 per month for both major sites.
Wishes to everyone for a Blessed Christ Day. Our Christmas Greeting to YOU at this URL:
posted on December 24, 2000 06:46:09 AM
www.icestorm.com
I pay 12.95 for 50MB
They start with "free" and of course you can go up the ladder and get the entire bells and whistles for more.
I do think they had miva. (?) I remember they supported several programming like frontpage, cgi-script etc.
I've been very happy with the service. I started with free but then I grew, and grew so I opted to start paying.
Miva is a server side scripting language. Basically it can't do anything that Perl can't.
I believe the real advantages of it are to the server, in that it is safer to run than a cgi program. Most hosts that have Miva also allow cgi - Cybrmall.net does - they support Python, PHP, Perl, etc.
I just don't have time to learn a new language, and since I already know Miva I just as soon stick with it. I've tried to install some pre-written perl scripts, but couldn't get them to work. At least with Miva I know how to get it to work.
If you want to check out my "baby" see http://www.cobblestonecorner.com/postcards/ I wrote that section of the site pretty much all in Miva - rotating script to change the "featured" cards, search engine to find cards, and the postcard script itself.
posted on December 24, 2000 07:22:17 AM
We use BlueGravity.com for our straight html sites. $25 a month for 17 sites. (not $25 each, $25 total) Fast servers, great prices if you run multiple sites, but no turnkey ecommerce support.
We use Hostway.com for our Ecommerce site that uses Miva Merchant. $39.95 a month. We tried 3 other companies and had to dump them because their servers couldn't handle the software properly. Miva Merchant is a great package, but it is extremely server intensive and is very hard to find a hosting company with enough horsepower to run it properly.
We use AFHosting.com for our four Ecommerce sites that use WBB/Shopzone software. $29.95 a month for the first site, $14.95 each for the other three. (we have been with them for five years and they have never raised our rates) Service and support is nearly non-existant, but most companies would charge $49 to $129 each for hosting our sites because of the software they use.
Tips for selecting a hosting company:
Check to see if they have telephone numbers for both sales and support. Call them. If they don't answer the phone when you are trying to give them money, they certainly won't answer when you need help. And chances are, at some point you will need help.
Have them provide you with the URL of several customers' sites. Bookmark the sites and bang them at all hours of the day to see how fast they load. If you see problems, scratch them off your list. Their is nothing worse than checking your auctions on Sunday afternoon to find your pictures are not loading.
If possible, try to avoid hosting companies that charge a setup fee. In many cases, this was implemented due to a high rate of cancelations. The exception to this is sites that use third party software such as Miva Merchant. This software costs them $65 to $99 per user license depending upon their volume, and most companies need to recoup some of this cost upfront.
"You get what you pay for" rule does not apply to webhosting. Just because they are cheap, doesn't make them bad, and just because they are expensive, doesn't make them good. There are some excellent low cost options out there if you look around.
Check out other people's auctions. See who they use. Do this by browsing any catagory and seeing how long it takes for the pictures to load. Right click on the picture, and go to properties. This will show the URL and typically help you find out who is hosting the pictures. If you find pictures that don't load, do the same and make a note of the hosting company. To find out who is hosting a particular domain, do a whois lookup. The name server is usually the same as the hosting company. (ie: ns.bluegravity.com is the name server for the domains we have hosted with bluegravity.com) It is a lot of work to do it this way, but it will help in the long run.
posted on December 24, 2000 09:55:05 AM
jwpc, thanks for posting your link about your website with the Christ Day card...I have a very important question for you. Would you email me at [email protected] please?
posted on December 24, 2000 04:44:23 PM
I host my own sites and do host for others for $65.00 per year. I can't list my hosting address without breaking the rules here but I can tell you what we offer.
For the $65.00 you get 50mb of server space, 10 email or FTP log in accounts, mix and match the 10. We host on Mac G-4 servers and offer two flavors of webserver software. One is Web* with NetCloak Pro running. NC pro is a server side program that does what perl does and more. It is CGI for dummies and there are plug-ins for it to use with DreamWeaver. Other flavor is good ol Apache. I also offer full blown e-commerce hosting with web based site building scripts that allow you to build a store with no HTML experience needed. The shopping server option adds a another $60.00 per year to your bill. If anyone is interested contact me.
