Web Hosting

[SERG]

I'm desiging a website for a friends company. He is looking to just have a web prescence, nothing spectacular. I don't much about web hosting companies, etc. I'm looking for something real cheap...I know there are sites like http://www.doteasy.com/ because I've done websites for people who have used this service.

Is there anything wrong with using a site like this? Any other suggestions for hosting sites.

Again, it's not for anything spectacular, just information about the services they offer (home restoration).

Thanks for the help.

[stpitner]

I'm actually looking for web hosting too, but I need something quite a bit more elaborate.

I designed a site for someone that is with doteasy, and she hasn't had any real problems.  One thing did come up where I had a form configured so that members could send her an email via the site.  Somehow someone was able to monkey with that form and use it to send out mass amounts of spam.  They either figured out her password or something because I know I made one change to the code to try to stop them, but a couple hours later I found out that the page had been changed back to what it was before the change.  I changed her password and tried to put up a new, secure script, but they still got around it.  I wound up having to take down the contact portion.  The only way that we knew that this was happening was because she was getting hundreds of emails returned to her email address saying "undeliverable" with a bunch of garbage as the email content.

After contacting doteasy they said that they will only support their own script that they have for a secure form (written in php).  So at least they had *some* kind of alternative in order to help prevent the people abusing it.  I have no idea if the site was abused because it was a doteasy site or because they just found some kind of security hole.  I think all in all she likes her site.  www.operationpenguin.com  Nothing elaborate, but I was still able to get the site together.  I don't remember if they allow a MySQL database or not.  If your friend doesn't need something like that though, then it is no big deal.  If they want to sell stuff on the site or keep an inventory, then the basic doteasy plan isn't going to cut it.

I have another guy that has his site hosted through www.valueweb.com (entered the deal via CostCo), and I think he's somewhere around $20/month.  I know you can do a lot more with that site (www.needsmet.org or the site that I created for him www.needsmet.org/willow), but that might be more than what your friend's company needs.

I'm currently looking at www.pro-net-hosting.com for my hosting, but that is going to be a lot more than what you would probably need (even though it's pretty cheap).  Right now I'm looking at the plan that is only $10/month (and on sale for $60 for the 1st year if you pay for the whole year up front), but I'm pretty sure you need to be pretty computer knowledgeable to get the site up and running.  I doubt it has an interface on their site to maintain your files and you'd have to upload and maintain the site via an FTP or *maybe* you can do it through Frontpage, but I'm not sure.

Tripod.com has decent hosting, but I think it might be a little more expensive.

Scott

[mirth]

Mirth has a server & hosts sites for people....

[stpitner]

You probably already have something now, but I just saw about this today:

http://officelive.microsoft.com/default.aspx

I guess the free package you get a free domain name and 30 meg of space.  Sounds like a good deal to me!