OMO recommend me a web host

[littleoldman2]

Hi looking for a web hosting service for a site on behalf of my beloved wife. She needs about 4 - 7 pages. Roughly half images and half text. I have no idea which companies can offer a reliable service at a reasonable cost.
Also would appreciate any input about optimising web search engines keywords etc.
Thanks in advance.

[Rokerman]

I can't speak more highly of www.vidahost.com
Excellent support and products.

I use them for my own stuff and also work (high end servers).

[Specialone]

Www.1and1.co.uk

I've used these for last 7 years, very good service.

[Rokerman]

Www.1and1.co.uk
I've used these for last 7 years, very good service.

Blimey, if there were two web hosts that I wouldn't recommend it would be 1and1 and Fasthosts.

[littleoldman2]

Family member had problems with Fasthosts a few years ago, after he changed to another service they continued to take money via a direct debit for "automatic renewal". But others may have had a different experience.

[Paul the 6th]

is it for e-commerce type stuff like selling goods? Or just a page to showcase some bits & pieces?

I've recently found wix.com are great for templates which you can easily double click to edit text/pictures etc. (there's a 3-5 min tutorial video) and you can try it for free to see if you get on with it. It's about £90 a year to pay for their little wix adverts removing from it, but the design/quality/ease of editing have been worth it for me after endlessly trying various services.

And you can get .co.uk domains for £8.99 for 2 years from easily.co.uk, then set the domain to point at your wix page = website bosch. :)

[littleoldman2]

Hi Paul. My better half runs a small contract cleaning business. The website will be used for people to check out her company, recruit the right kind of staff and to generate calls. At the moment she is not interested in selling supplies or bill payment and the like.

[Bibio]

are you with virgin?

[littleoldman2]

No afraid not we don't have cable here.

[Bibio]

pity as you get free hosting.

[Davadvice]

If you use 1&1 be careful of their T&Cs they use rolling contracts, I did use them but did have issues and their cancellation policy is a PITA.

[Bibio]

yup 1&1 are a pain in the rear to try and cancel anything and make nothing obvious. for instance you would think that in your account you would be able to view and edit your domains... ermmm no so instead there is a completely different hidden sub section you have to go to to cancel domains you no longer want. i have never used them for hosting but having been with them for a goood number of years they like to make things difficult regarding cancellations of anything. another PITA is transferring names to a different registrar or owner, they dont like that one little bit and make everything very difficult for you to do so, if you don't reply to emails then they cancel your transfers etc.etc.

when you do cancel a domain and just want it to run out they don't show this on your domain control so you end up pressing the wrong button as there is no others and bam that domain is reinstated.

i'll be looking for somewhere different to park my names soooooon

[JamesMio]

Avoid 1&1 as if they were wandering around caked in cowshat with their pecker hanging out - honestly, they're a feckin nightmare.

Assuming it's a UK based company, aiming at UK based customers/clients - then make sure you go for a UK based web host. It makes a real difference.
We could host it for you (http://www.creatomatic.co.uk) on our servers, no probs but I guess we might be a little pricier / overkill than you're needing?

Failing us (and excusing the ever-so-blatant sales pitch :D), RapidSwitch are excellent, but expensive and I've also heard plenty of good things about Heart too.

Keywords / Google stuff is more or less what I do for a living (well, less so now we've got employees) so feel free to fire anything you want to know at me on that.

Cheers
JM

[kaivalagi]

If you are not too afraid of the technical side (as you'll need a separate domain name registration) I use a pay as you go service that has cost me all of USD$40 for the last 5 years including having a MySQL backend running at all of 1c a day for most of that :)

I get emailed when credit is low and add more as and when I need to. Great for low bandwidth sites as it's cost is based on activity, if no-one visits there is no real cost; the hosting service also supports sftp/ssh/mysql/php etc etc. They can be found here: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

You will have to setup the DNS entries based on a separate domain name purchase but it works out cheap in the long run and performs well too.

For domain name registration I went with name.com and paid USD$10 for 2 years of a .net address which came with google services for free so I have email/docs etc support under my own URLs.

Hope that helps, not everyone's cup of tea but it works for me, you only go through the pain of setup once...

[Specialone]

I can only talk from experience regarding 1and1, so far they have been sound but i havent tried to cancel anything yet in fairness, i'd just cancel my direct debit if i didnt want it anymore along with an email telling them.

But i pay £35 every 6 months i think, which is tax deductable for me so i aint really bothered about moving etc.

[timwilky]

I run my own servers so much easier to be able to use what ever technologies you want. Ask most hosting services about Oracle application express and they wont have a clue. etc. multi tier architectures. seperation of business logic, data and presentation.

Use afraid.org for free DNS. I no longer host mail servers and throw it all though google.

[ayandre92]

My personal recommendation for best email and website hosting (https://www.theemailshop.co.uk/email-hosting-uk/) is siteground because of pricing they are neither expensive nor cheap, but reasonable. They offer three tiers of hosting: Startup (offers hosting for one website), Grow Big, and GoGeek (these last two offer hosting for multiple sites). They promise excellent website speeds and live up to that promise.