[sclug] good vfm hosting providers?

[Simon Champion]

Hia,

Ah yes, 123-Reg. Ho-hum.

For what it's worth, I work for an ISP that provides hosting -- www.skymarket.co.uk.

Our prices aren't the cheapest out there, so I suspect you won't end up coming to us (we tend to target the higher end of the market and resellers, focusing on reliability and quality support rather than price), but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

The trouble with hosting these days is that most of the big/cheap players are busy busying each other out and cutting corners on their services to compete with each other. The headline stats (webspace, bandwidth, etc) look fantastic, but as you've seen with 123-Reg, there are always caveats. (anyone remember uk2.net and their 2p domain names?)

Anyway, if price really is an important factor, your best bet is to host in the US. There are several server farms out there which are priced low enough to wipe out anything this side of the pond, and they should have all the services you need.

Hope that helps.  :-)



    SimonC.



John Stumbles wrote:
> Sprog's just registered himself a domain name (jmetron.com) with 
> 123-reg but found the thrown-in free web hosting only gives him a 
> mickey mouse site-builder gui, no ftp. I've been humming and haaing 
> about buying some hosting (sadly the black cat got eaten by a mythic 
> beast :-)) so thinking about a cheapo commodity hosting package. Any 
> heads up on good providers to go with, and what to look/watch out for?
>
> Just basically a reasonable amount of web & email space and as little 
> frontpage/exchange bollards as possible. Just want to register a few 
> domains, point them at web and mail servers and push web pages up to 
> them / pop mail off them.
>
> Looking at 123-reg's offerings (http://www.123-reg.co.uk/web-hosting/) 
> I can see for starters:
> * no php (don't know if I'd want this, though I'm thinking I'd like to 
> run a mediawiki which I think wants that and mysql, so maybe a bit 
> ambitious for a budget hosting package)
> * doesn't say anything about limits of mailbox sizes
> * doesn't say how they count the 15 or whatever mailboxes, whether you 
> can point your domain name at the mailbox(es), any server-side spam 
> filtering
> * what happens if you (your site visitors?) go over your data transfer 
> limit
>
>
> I'm sure I saw a more attractive looking package when I was browsing a 
> few weeks back but can't remember where now :-(
>