Suggestion Please for Cheapo Webhosting Package - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 17, 2012, 09:09:03 pm
content: currently reconsidering my webhoster. my godaddy seems not very comfortable. since i dont get much revenue at the moment, i'm considering cheap plan. i only need basic stuff like windows plan, ftp capability, php enabled, cpanel or such basic standard stuffs. is this $1/month plan is ok?http://webhostingworld.net/cheap_windows_hosting_details.phpi can google for more cheap hosters but i wish suggestion from people with experience about them to avoid got scammed or ripped off later on. my domain name will stays at the godaddy for now i think. thanks.

author: PeterG
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 17, 2012, 09:37:38 pm
content: Looks very good for the price.....$12/year. Cant go wrong really.Regards

author: ndictu
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 17, 2012, 09:46:16 pm
content: Never heard of them, but they claim to have a 30 day trial so try them out and decide then.If you need something really minimal and cheap, I recommend NearlyFreeSpeech:https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricingI've used them for a while few years back for a tiny little site and it cost like $10 for the entire time.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 17, 2012, 10:53:20 pm
content: Before I moved to dedicated servers, I've used ICDSOFT.COM - not linking it so you wouldn't think I'm spamming it.It costs more (about 5-6$ a month), you have to pay in advance for a year, you can only host one main domain on your account and several subdomains but the servers are really high quality and not overloaded with thousands of websites. And support... I recommended them to a friend and confirmed to me they still answer to questions within 5-10 minutes.Well, you don't even have to take my word for it, try searching for reviews for them.... you won't find a lot because they don't have huge affiliate programs but I think it will be very hard to find anything bad among the ones you find.Keep in mind that most large companies have huge affiliate plans in which they pay up to 75% of the amount a person pays to referrals, so you'll find tons of websites with articles of the "top 10 shared hosting companies to buy from" - they're not honest. Go to hosting forums such as webhostingtalk.com or forums.digitalpoint.com and search there for real reviews.Besides this company, I've used for a short period netfirms.com after finding a "95$ off a 100$ plan" coupon and they were relatively OK, but their datacenters were in Canada and had poor connectivity outside US and Canada. Basically, the file transfers were slowish and the servers didn't feel "snappy".I've also used Dreamhost, which is kinda crap. Don't get me wrong, it's cheap, for some personal sites, blogs, image galleries whatever, they're ok... but they're not really professional. They have a very friendly attitude, they're open about what they do, but their servers are really crashing a lot and they shove tons of websites on each cluster of servers. So you lose email access for a couple of hours every few days, because a hard drive crashes. Basically, they assign thousands of user accounts to a server that only processes scrips and serves pages, but retrieves the actual files through a network attached storage that's shared between 10-50 servers, and the scripts themselves connect to a mysql server that's also used by several thousand accounts... you get the point, lots of points of failure and lots of opportunities to have your sites feel slow, unreliable.About Nearly Free Speach... i've heard only good things about them. Can't comment.Please stay away from big companies like GoDaddy... the bigger they are, the more inflexible they are, won't be able to add custom scripts for you on their servers, won't help you out as well...GoDaddy in particular is a bad company, as they supported SOPA and other bad bills, its owner hunts big animals and kills elephants in Africa just for "fun", they spend a ton of money on close to indecent advertising (well not really indecent, but stupid advertising, for people that don't know anything about Internet...), they shove a lot of crap on you when you try to buy anything (upsell), they had dirty selling behavior in the past (you would search for domains and try to buy them later to find out they were bought by GoDaddy and they want to auction them to you), they killed websites only on request from other companies and transferred the domains to them (without any jury, law, whatever, legal reason)... and there's probably more.

author: ndictu
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 17, 2012, 11:02:37 pm
content: Quote from: mariush on January 17, 2012, 10:53:20 pmYup, recently they announced public support for SOPA, and after many, many people and companies started moving away from them they quickly retracted that statement. They still support it, just don't talk about it now. I was actually disappointed that I don't have any business with them so I could move away.Also, I can confirm bad stories about dreamhost. As a rule of thumb - if the site is filled with marketing speak, huge banners, stock photo of phone support ladies and happy guys in suits, it's going to be a disaster. They put all their cash in advertising and marketing. On the other hand, NFS and similar hosting are run mostly by people who now what they are doing. Their sites might look very simple but you can bet that if you have a problem at 3am there is going to be a geek on the other end of the support line that can help you and not a techsupport drone that will waste your time.In any case, make sure they have a trial, at least 30 days. Try it out and cancel in case of any problems.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 17, 2012, 11:57:19 pm
content: Quote from: ndictu on January 17, 2012, 11:02:37 pmI agree, NFS and mysql clustering and so on are all great technologies, but in the case of Dreamhost, they're not used to give more performance to the user, but rather save them money. For you, it's just multiple points of failure and multiple choke points.When I had account on ICDSoft, about 5 years ago, they had close to latest generation (for that time) quad cores, with 8 GB of memory and a RAID5 system, the mysql ran on the local machine and on a reverse search, the server was hosting about 190 websites. A year and a half or so after, when I tried Dreamhost, the reverse search found about 17k websites served from the IP of the dreamhost server I was allocated to.They still look almost as clumsy and amateur as they looked then:http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2012/01/11/shared-mail-service-issues-on-homiemail-sub5-is-being-investigated/It took them a week to sort an email issue.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2012, 01:34:10 am
content: When you are paying $12 a year, then one service request to the host will probably cost them more then that $12. So it is usually case case that if you are lucky, then everything will just work, but if things go wrong, you may have to be ready to jump to a new host. In the past, I have used several $12-type hosts and usually at some point, I have been forced to move to something better.If you only have a small site, you can usually move to a new hosting company in minutes, and it will then take one to two days for the DNS to point to the new site. So I think if you feel like trying them, go for it. Have a "plan B" site in mind if you need to change quickly. Things will probably work fine, and if they go bad, just move on to a new host. Simple!Definitely, never have the domain registered with the same company as the site hosting. If you get into a dispute with the site hosting company that is also the domain registrar, they can suspend both the site and the domain until you pay the $600 penalty fee, or whatever they are claiming. When the registrar is separate, you change change to new hosing sites any time you want.The key thing about your domain registrar is that you have to really trust them, as at the end of the day, ICANN has shown in some previous cases that they will not stand up to big registrars on behalf of users when ICANN is threatened with big lawsuits. There is one registrar that went bust, and the people still in control reportedly started confiscating valuable domains of their customers, and at the time, ICANN did nothing to intervene. I do not think there is a system in place for the database of a failed registrar to automatically be passed on to anyone else to preserve the ownership and history of domains. If a registrar goes under, you may loose your domains, so you have to choose Registrars that look like they will survive. The only recourse you would have is to go to court. I have never liked GoDaddy myself. I have used Moniker a fair bit and I am sure there are a number of other ethical registrars.Richard

author: SoftwareSamurai
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2012, 01:55:09 am
content: I use ICDSoft for my domains also. They seem to have a fair price and excellent service IMHO. My only gripe is that their domain email doesn't handle sub-domains directly, meaning I can't isolate emails for each sub-domain. But that's minor I suppose. (Not sure if any domain hosts actually do that anyway.)

author: ndictu
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2012, 08:55:49 am
content: Quote from: mariush on January 17, 2012, 11:57:19 pmUh, I meant NearlyFreeSpeech, didn't realize it could be confusing ... But yeah, if not done properly, NFS is be a terrible thing.

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2012, 12:06:54 pm
content: thanx guys for inputs, hope more will come. the problem with godaddy is i got annoyed with renewal plan into my email before i got my next breath (i thought i've paid binual fee), and its confusing, including the interface (web and control panel), ftp speed is not a wonder either. my website is only very simple html with some low res pictures and files, i dont think its worth a bother from them with their discount and free hosting plan etc. its a $6/mths plan and i never been happy when i logged into my account (confusion and inefficient UI). my plan in one step at a time, ie move the hosting first and see how it goes, if godaddy still give me bad impression after that, i might find another registar as well.

author: ndictu
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2012, 07:56:21 pm
content: Quote from: Mechatrommer on January 18, 2012, 12:06:54 pmRe: Email - Have you tried Google Apps for Business? They have free version for <10 users. Comes with other google products as well. This + some webhosting gives you a pretty good infrastructure with a website, mail server, calendar, documents storage and so on.Also, if you want 24/7 support and guaranteed reliability (+ more space, other stuff) it's 5USD/4EUR per user per month. Not that bad if you are the only user... Although I've been happy with my free version so far.