Does anyone have any suggestions for a web hosting company. I need to know the pros and cons of both.

I went ona site that listed a few of them and compared them. What do you think of these if oyu know them:

Powweb - www.powweb.com

Ipower - ipower.com

blue host - bluehost.com

dot5hosting - www.dot5hosting.com

I may have afew mopre questions as the time comes as this is sort new to me. Just for info sake, I am looking to sell things on this site. I haven't ironed everything out yet, I am just in the starting phases of this. Thanks for any input.

RickJ

I have 11 sites at Lunarpages.

Been with them 3 years now.

Don't take my word, though. Check out their plans, then google for

lunarpages AND reviews

And btw, they have an awesome Webmaster's forum too.

jduke44

Ok, so here are my questions. The only thing at this point I am planning on doing is accepting people's personal info (name, phone#, address, etc) and probably go through paypal or something for cc transactions.

1)Do you think I would need a secure site for this? After looking at different sites, I am now confused at what features I absolutely need and what ones I might need later.

2) There are some sites that only have unix systems nd don't support ASP. I don't know anything about ASP. Do you know the advantages of using this?

To give a little background: I know HTML fairly well. I am learning the advanced web page things as I go.

I will start there and probably ask more later. Thanks Rick

RickJ

1. If you go through paypal you won't need SSL at all.

2. If you gather personal info on your site, you'll want security. Lunarpages offers free SSL (which I use for small transactions here) or a personal one for $60 a year (which I use here).

3. I don't use ASP for anything. There are a zillion things that will be beneficial for you to learn over time, but ASP should not be near the top of your list.

As for design, go easy on yourself. Pick up a copy of Microsoft Front Page for $80 and you'll be loving life. I started with Front Page and even though I now use Dreamweaver, it's expensive - and Front Page will do everything you want for at least a couple years is my guess.

You might be able to find a deal on DreamweaverMX used, since Dreamweaver8 just came out.

ScottGem

The advantage of ASP is being able to connect your pages to a database. But ASP isn't the only solution to that.

jduke44

Rickj - thanks for your sites. This gives me a good reference point for web hosting as to what I might need. I need to weigh the pros and cons of each company I am considering. As far as Front page or anything, I guess I am a glutton for punishment and may do this strictly from scratch. In the future I may get tired of it and do it from Front page or dreamweaver.

Scott - thanks for your input. I wasn't sure what it would be used for. If that is it, then I won't worry about it. Unfortunately, I don't know what I will need in the future.

Thanks guys for your time.

LTheobald

Just thought I'd add my answers although this has been covered...

If you are not storing anything sensitive like credit card numbers then you won't need SSL. If you are using PayPal etc. to process transactions you probably won't even need their address. As well as Paypal, take a look at WorldPay too.

Unix systems will very rarely support ASP. ASP is a Microsoft technology and therefore is for Windows systems. On Unix, you're more likely to encounter PHP instead.

I think it may be worth learning a little PHP or ASP. From the sounds of it you are trying to make some kind of online catalog, store etc. Things will be much easier if all your products are contained in a database which you can update. Just putting all the different products straight into several HTML pages is messy and will be a pain to update

jduke44

Yeah, my wife and I are toying with the idea of selling things on the internet and doing other online business type stuff for extra income. We just thought to do this so it is in the very early stages. I may have to do it the messy way right now until I learn PHP though. I appreciate your thoughts as this gave me another angle to look at.

I didn't know PHP was UNIX technology. How hard is this to learn? I do know some light programming if this helps to learn PHP.

I may ask you how to do this in the future when I am ready.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. How would you guess how much bandwith you need?

You guys are great! I knew I could count on you to point me in the right direction.

LTheobald

PHP isn't a just UNIX technology - it's been built for both Windows and Linux. So you can quite happily get PHP running on your machine.

As for the question, is PHP easy to learn? Well I found it easy to pick up but I had been programming for a few years before this. It's also similar to other languages I have used. But I would still say it is pretty easy for somebody to pick it up. All the commands are very close to English (e.g. mysql_connect() to open a database, strcmp() to compare two strings). Here are some good sites to help you learn PHP with tutorials etc.

PHP Freaks - A personal favourite of mine. Lots of useful tutorials and an extremely active forum to ask questions in.

Dev Shed's PHP Area - The articles here ar eprobably a bit more advanced than what a beginner would need but the site is still worth a mention. Also has a fantastic forum for getting your questions answered.

PHP Resource Index - Index of various tutorials, articles, code snippets etc.

W3School's PHP Area - W3Schools is always a great place for beginners. Well worth a look.

Not to mention your local library/bookstore is bound to have a lot of books on PHP.


The best way to learn PHP is to get it working on your Windows machine. That would mean downloading and installing Apache (a web server), PHP & MySQL (a database) then getting them all working together. Now that sounds like a pain but luckily it isn't (hurrah!). You can download things called WAMP packages. WAMP stands for Windows Apache MySQL and PHP. it basically will install all three for you in one go. The WAMP package that I use can be found here.

So if you do start to learn a little PHP (and I do recommend it for creating an online store - to access a DB containing your products), feel free to post questions here and we should be able to answer them for you.

simplysrujan

I personally use and like this hosting company.
They have excellent plans
type price total domains free domains storage data transfer

unix $3.95pm 2 1 10GB 100GB
unix $6.45pm 6 3 20GB 300GB
unix $12.95pm 10 5 unlimited 500GB
windows $8.95pm 6 3 20GB 300GB
windows $14.95 10 5 unlimited 500GB
Please visit ixhosting at using my referral link
http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1799731-10388525

Thanks
Srujan

PS: I personally am looking for a hosting company with a dedicated server that can handle 2000GB band width or more per month. Any recommendations? I googled a lot but couldnt find any