Searching for a good web hosting company

[JR2]

My wife and I have started a small business and are in the process of setting up a website. The site is very simple and will only be about 10 pages max. I am trying to find a good web hosting company to use and I am overwelmed with all that are out there. Anyone have any ideas for a company to use? I need a company that has an online control pannel and is fairly simple to use. I only need a couple of email addresses for the site, or maybe just a couple email forewarding accounts. I have already registered my domain name through another company so that my host does not control my domain name.



Places I have been looking at:



www.Lunarpages.com

www.iPowerweb.com

www.ICDsoft.com

www.Globat.com





I found them all at www.webhostingratings.com



Thanks in advance.



John

 

[klenger]

I'm using powweb for mine. Been with them for over three years. Their up-time is good, but support is pretty poor. $7. 77 / month for 1GB. See http://www.klenger.net/ for a link to them.

 

[PRyker]

JR2,



Hey, I am the founder of SkyNetWEB, a dedicated server company and was the VP of Operations for Affinity Internet (3rd largest US web host) for a few years before I left in Oct last year to move back to Maryland. I have been in the hosting business for many years and I can tell you it is a freakin mess out there!! Hosting has become a commodity and now everyone who can afford a server and colo space wants in.



There are hundreds of choices out there but I can narrow down the playing field very quickly. There are basically two types of companies: Discount and value add. If you are slightly computer and HTML competent then you should lean towards the discount space.



From my experience doing research of competitors when I worked at Affinity I would recommend Ipowerweb.com if you do not mind figuring things out on your own. They have a good control panel and decent uptime. Yahoo also has a decent offering but I believe ipowerweb's control panel is better.



If you want all of the fancy stuff then I would recommend 1and1.com. They are the worlds largest and are based in Germany. Those germans sure know how to build a massive data center let me tell you!!!!



Stay away from anything related to Interland and CIHost. I am not recommending any of the Affinity brands (hostsave, winsave, valueweb, bistep) because I am partial to them since I helped build them. I will say ValueWeb has the absolute best customer service of any hosting company in the US. We chose to keep our call center here in the US and NOT OUTSOURCE!!! many others have outsourced and their support sucks!!



By the way, if you want cheap domain name registration use joker.com or godaddy.com



good luck!



Phil

 

[JR2]

Phil,

Thanks for the info, I registered my domain with namecheap for $9 a year and it took less than 5 minutes total. I set up an email account with them to foreward to another email account and it worked less that 2 minutes after I completed the transaction. So that is done.



I am a little more than competent on the conputer end, but an absolute rookie at HTML. I think I can handle the discount side of the things. My business page is going to be nothing more than a couple of pages of info and a couple of forms you can download. My brother has some HTML skills and is going to build the site for me, so really all I have to do is rent the server space and administer it.



Thanks for your help, I will check out all the different ones you mentioned. I was leaning toward ICDsoft after reading about them on some chat bords for webhosting. They have stellar tech support with the average time to return an email of 5 minutes.



thanks again.