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Hi
can anyine give me some good advice on setting up my own website? it will be for my small business and to be honest i am well confused by all the differant companys that offer web hosting and what they offer. i just need somewhere that will host my website and also have free tools that i can use to set up my website...any advice you can give me is most appreciated ....thanks in advance
There are a few that have been recommended to me, they also have sales on at the moment, 2 are american websites but that does not particuaraly affect you.
www(dot)godaddy(dot)com
www(dot)name(dot)com
www(dot)mediatemple(dot)net
Sorry, I cant do links yet.
I'm assuming this is a UK company you're talking about. If it is, then you want a web host based in the UK, as the website will load marginally faster (because it's geographically closer). For example, my website is 14ms away. If it were in the US, it would be around 100ms away.
Right, onto my suggestion. I use tsohost(dot)com. I would suggest their "cloud" plans (as opposed to their cPanel plans), as they cost the same, but have far better performance. If you use the promo code "MINUS10", you'll get 10% off, so buy a year or two in advance for a nice discount :)
EDIT: How could I forget - their support! Is amazing! If you don't believe me, give them a ring on their freephone number (0800 024 2931) - which is open 9am-11pm. I've emailed at stupid times during the night and had reposes within quarter of an hour...
Not necessarily.Quote:
Originally Posted by benzeman
I agree that that may well be a typical lag, but there's more to it than that. For a start, if you use a small UK company (and I don't mean UK companies are necessariky small) that has low-powered servers stuffed to the gills with loads of sites, or even a relative few that are highly demanding, then the server comformance can be lousy even when the net lag is good. Another company, that maybe happens to be US based, may have more powerful servers, better network infrastructure in their data centre, and so on.
Also, in my opinion, for any company providing a service supporting your business, then FAR more important than lag times are issues likecserver uptime, and when it doex go down, how fast does it come back up?
If, for instance, the business is using ecommerce, even for a small business, then reconstituting a dead server may take a couple of hours, or several days. I've experienced both. Do you want customers unable to contact you, or worse yet, unable to buy, for several days?
A LOT depends on exactly what use a business is going to put a site to. A simple few pages of basic text is a very different proposition from an ecommerce site, or even something like a forum like this one, where there are large numbers of MySQL queries (processor-intensive database queries) and a significant and more or less constant load implied by that.
By and large, and with some notable exceptions, you tend to get what you pay for, and it's down to any business to determine what that extra level of service is worth, as compared to what it costs.
Sorry to say it, Sherpa, but it's not a simple decision, and it's hard to recommend a supplier fora business site without knowing quite a bit more about what you need .... including what tools you may need.
I use unlimitedwebhosting(co.uk) and found them very reliable, flexible and responsive. Falcoda(co.uk) wasn't bad either
I wouldn't trust a webhost that claims to provide "unlimited" disk space until an "unlimited" hard drive is created. There will be a hidden limit, as no company would sell hosting at a loss. I would just ignore it.Quote:
Originally Posted by 007
Falcoda also looks funny to me - I don't like companies that quote a "monthly" price based on paying a year in advance. Perhaps it's just me...
Evo hosting - been with them for years and they're fantastic :)
ezpzhosting are based in the UK and provide me with timely support for a semi-managed hosting service. They seem to have some pretty good security features on their servers which is important if you are running a business. For example, if there are a few attempts to log in to your control panel or FTP account then they will block access from that IP address. They also have their servers configured with a few creative solutions so that they don't have to take them down when updating them (e.g. if updating the kernel, for which you would usually have to reboot) to maximize up-time. When considering UK vs US you also need to consider any implications this may have with regards to compliance with data protection legislation (for exporting data outside of the EU) and PCI-DSS compliance if you are processing customer payment data. As mentioned previously, service is extremely important and factor this in when looking at cost. Is it cheaper / has an offer on because they are not providing quality support? If you let us know a little bit more about the types of things you want to do with your website then this may help narrow it down a bit.
As for a web building tool, have you heard of Twitter Bootstrap? This is a framework Twitter have put together for creating very professional looking sites. The good news is that there are some really cool tools out there for putting together Bootstrap sites if you don't fancy delving in yourself.
One I have tried is http://jetstrap.com/ which seems fairly solid.
A VPS is the best hosting option. You can find some cheap VPS providers as well.
I think (but I'm not 100% sure) that having the server physically located in the UK has the advantage of putting you up in the search results on Google UK.
I can suggest you only two websites.
www(dot)godaddy(dot)com
www(dot)ewebguru(dot)com.
Sorry I am not allowed to link these sites.
You aren't allowed to advertise your commercial website in your home page either. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve7
If you are not web designer you will likely end up fail to build a website after waste all of your time. Ask your self is website really important to your business?
Hiring agent do your website they usually gives first year free hosting. And remember Fast, Good, Cheap you can only choose 2 of them.
Lithium Hosting is great, although there's no website builder.