Web Hosting Services

[Narnia]

Has anyone developed their own web site? If so how did you decide on a hosting service? Any advice welcomed.

[mald]

Hi Narnia,

you could do worse than check out 123-reg.co.uk for hosting - there are other companies out there, but you can buy a domain name from them fairly cheaply and get hosting (including a bunch of email boxes) for about ?40 a year.

As I say, there are others, but I've not used them so hard to comment.

good luck!

[steveo]

Clara.net ?30 a year. Never been a hitch (or a hike) in 9 years

[Loz]

I use http://orchardhosting.com/. I switched to them from http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/ Both are quite good, but Orchard had a better deal on Joomla hosting, so I switched to them.

Orchard charge ?4 per year for a .co.uk domain name (that's portable to another provider if you ever change - you might want to check that other deals) and have hosting packages at ?9.99, ?24.99, ?49.99 per year. The couple of times I have needed to contact support the response has been excellent.

[PeckhamRose]

I have only ever used 123.reg mentioned above.

A few problems in the early days through my ignorance but they did try and help.

Not had a problem, but have no experience to compare!

[dbboy]

Have been using Fasthosts for a number of years, are very reasonable and hosting platform is stable

http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/

[Huguenot]

You should give some thought to what you want your website to do, and how you want to build it before selecting a host.

For my own sites I use DotNetNuke, a highly flexible and modular content management system. However, it needs a particular hosting environment using .NET and SQL.

DNN generates pages at the point that they're accessed, meaning that it's processor hungry. For this reason I steer clear of the kind of bulk hosting suppliers that drive costs down by cramming as many websites as possible onto each server.

If you want to retail online then you need to give some thought to server security, and the demands of payment gateways and so on.

If you want to use DNN to generate a fantastic website at very little effort, then you might want to use a specialist supplier like powerdnn.