Large Scale Central

Web Hosting

General Discussion
#1

My term of service is about up with 1and1 - as is my patience. Lots of spam all of a sudden, plus they were marketing a new email interface and kept calling my home, but not leaving a message. When I emailed them to stop, they said give us your home number and we’ll stop calling it. Right.

I’m looking for a good hobbyist web site. The service should provide one domain, email with anti-spam and storage. I don’t need any build your own tools. FTP is obviously required as well. Inexpensive is good.

Any recommendations???

#2

Bruce I have changed over to Littleoak.com. MAC specialist, and partnered with Rapidweaver for hosting. Smaller company, out of LA & Phoenix, Great personal service. GO Daddy will never get any of my business, or recommends ever again.

#3

Paul Norton shifted, or at least redid, the OVGRS.ORG website.

He might be able to shed some light on your choices.

The Vermont Garden Railway Society, VGRS.US uses a web site building program called Weebly.

Weebly does have the ability to use HTML in some way. Perhaps only if your HTML is wrapped in something of theirs. They were helpful in getting the Domain pointing in the right direction. A LOT easier than trying to maintain an HTML only website!

WIX is another web site building program.

#4

I have a lot of stuff on Trainweb.org. It’s free, unlimited storage, and does require an FTP interface. For that I use Filezilla. It doesn’t have email as far as I know. It does require some gymnastics to post pictures from there. If you use it for an “Index” page they do require that they post a add for Trainweb at the top of the page. I hardly notice it.

My “Index” page is on Trainweb, but all my other pages are on Yahoo Small Business, which I pay monthly for. It isn’t much. They have Page builder program that comes with it that I find easy to use. Yahoo does have an email set up, which I don’t use, so can’t answer any questions about that. and you can use your own domain name.

If you have any questions feel free to call.

#5

Bruce I really like the one im using. Its fairly easy, cheap depending on the plan and clean looking

http://www.tripod.lycos.com/

Click on my link below to get an idea.

#6

Bob, I’d recommend SRI Hosting, now Khoza. https://khoza.com/

I’ve had my 550 page website and email there for years.

They run the servers themselves, near the main Internet trunk in Northern CA.

They are really sharp, and I have had them do some pretty tricky stuff for some of our email servers and other servers in my last job.

The message is that they will set up the server with the software you want/need and know what they are talking about and are not so huge that they don’t care about their customers.

Talk to Matt Simonsen and tell him you are a friend of mine, might be worth a few more bucks off the yearly costs.

Regards, Greg

#7

Is that the automated call I get nearly every day with no-one on the other end???

I’ve been using 1and1 for several years with very little spam or problems.

#8

John, that’s probably the NSA just letting you know that they have your number. :slight_smile:

#9

I use HostGator for my Podcast site. I haven’t had any problems with the service. I’m also an affiliate.

http://www.hostgator.com/

#10

Bruce, I use Godaddy for my service. I am paying for one hosting service and have five domains hosted there. I have had zero problems and no downtime to my knowledge. Servers are backed up daily, FTP is a no brainer (I use WSFTP or Filezilla). Cost is $120 (what I paid last time) per year, and I consider it inexpensive all things considered.

#11

Bruce,

I get a similar deal to Bob Cope’s from a Canadian source in Calgary (http://www.geohost.ca) been with them for ten years. Good service, excellent up time (unless they have freak snow storm in Sept) and they go the extra mile when needed.

#12

I’ve been at godaddy for years

http://tomruby.com

http://outsidetrains.com

http://barefootelectronics.com

http://midwestrails.org

http://tulsagardenrailroadclub.com

http://thinktulsa17.com/

http://improbable.me

#13

whoops… erased…

#14

1and 1 started ringing my phone early this year, they had my number because I forgot to update my credit card a while back. The caller ID just listed the city they were calling from and they never left a message. Out of curiosity I finally picked up one day and listened to their spiel about a new developer software and service and in spite of telling them I wasn’t interested and had no time for such nonsense they were very insistent. Against my better judgement I agreed to a one month trial then ignored the emails and phone calls from the developer. At the end of the month they stopped and checking my CC statements I was only charged the one month fee which wasn’t all that much. Haven’t heard a peep out of them since.

That said my only complaint with them is that they have changed things a lot on their control panel page and I can’t find stuff that was once there like how to get in and edit my guest book page which occasionally picks up some spam content.

#15

Well, I waited a bit too long for everything and ended up paying for the renewal at 1and1. I kept thinking it couldn’t get any worse, but it did. Over 50 spam a day…maybe more as I set up some filters to deal with it.

In contacting technical support, I found that I soon lost even more sanity the more I dealt with them. I was trying to get documentation for a parameter on their mail filters and they kept insisting I phone them. Right. Not going to wait on hold to talk to someone who can’t understand English. Not only that, but documentation seems to do better via an email.

Then they started insisting I call them for EVERY thing as that would be the only way they could verify my identity. Right.

So, I finally got around to doing some serious research. I quickly found out that Google was not my friend as there are so many paid sites that are merely propaganda fronts.

I contacted more than a few hosting sites with a list of prepared questions. Form letter responses that deal with my questions quickly eliminated companies from consideration.

I also found that I could get to some of the forums for the various sites and the comments there also eliminated many other companies.

Finally, I stumbled upon DigitalFaq and they had a good post about web hosting.

I had seen some other sites mention that it’s not necessarily a good idea to have your domain name and hosting done by the same company. My first step was to register my domain over at NameCheap. It costs just under $10 a year.

The domain was officially transferred yesterday but I was too stupid to realize the ramifications of this. Uh, that’s my email and web hosting site. Oops.

Veerotech came strongly recommended. I wanted good web hosting and really good anti-spam.

Today, I signed up for the package ($65 a year). I needed a bit of hand-holding, but I swear they’ve got the quickest technical support team I have ever encountered. I changed the nameservers over at NameCheap and was soon back in business - email and web hosting.

Total price is about the same as 1and1, but so far support is SO much better, and no spam, even without the 30 or so mail filters I used to have.

Still a few glitches to work out with my web publishing, but I’m pretty pleased with the switch.

#16

Bruce, if you have the capability to create a block list, drop these IPs into it

https://www.angryadmin.co.uk/?page_id=55

I did, and eliminated 99+ percent of bogus traffic and spam-account signups.

#17

Thanks. I’m not sure I’ll need it, as for some reason I’m not getting ANY spam now and I haven’t done anything other than move away from 1and1. But, it’s good to have. And, wow, is it ever nice to deal with a company that actually provides great customer support.

#18

Bruce Chandler said:

Thanks. I’m not sure I’ll need it, as for some reason I’m not getting ANY spam now and I haven’t done anything other than move away from 1and1. But, it’s good to have. And, wow, is it ever nice to deal with a company that actually provides great customer support.

I hate to be like Eeyore, but . . . if it is fine now, just wait a few years. My experience (going back 10 years) is that the good ones get complacent, or so good they get bought and changed. Just set things up so you can move everything every 5 years or so.

#19

How true, Pete. I started with 1and1 because they gave 3 years free to sign up! I was hooked. No real problems until the last year or so, but I thought I could hold out.

Anyway, it’s not hard to move my stuff since I just have HTML to worry about; no databases or scripts.

If these guys get bad, I’ll just move on…

#20

Glad you found a good answer. Did you ever call 1and1? Every time I do I get a knowladgeable tech that speaks fluent English with little accent. I rarely have to call, but when I do my luck has been good. Now my ISP, Charter, is a different story. With them on-line chat is the only way I can understangd thier techs, At least they type fluent English (http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-smile.gif)

I’ve also not had much of a Spam problem with them, but I’m very careful where I post my email address and have one just for spam bait when I need to give an address to a website that might be a spam source.