OT? I Need A New E-mail and Web Site Provider

[Paul Alciatore]

I know this has been discussed before and I will use the search. But things change so a fresh thread is probably a good thing. I am ditching my ISP due to many, many issues, the latest of which is an announced rate hike. I am already paying for service they don't provide and now they want even more.

So I am going to lose my E-mail address in the deal. Yea, nice guys. So I am going to bite the bullet and combine getting a new web site for my small business along with a new, hopefully more permanent e-mail account. I know some of you have your own internet sites as well as e-mails that go along with them and I would appreciate any advise that any of you can offer. I know it will cost something and I expect to pay. But I hope to keep it within reason, perhaps a yearly fee for both.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Mcgyver]

Most of us are going to opt for a shared server, based on dollars. The bargain basement ones like godaddy & hostgater work well for domain and web hosting (don't use the same one for each) but shared server email hosting sucks (some spam wanker gets the server blacklisted before the provider can take him down). I've left the domain names and hosting with those sorts and ended up using Zoho for email, their basic package is cheap and there is really great support. A bit futzing about on the forwarding and getting everything pointed correctly, but for me it delivers world class email and pretty good hosting, all for small dollars.

[olf20]

I've used Bizland for our site. I use their email to forward to our email
service (frontier.com). No real complaint other than they switched site
builder years ago and somehow I missed the change. Could not get into
our site to change anything, so I had to rebuild it. Ended up ok.
olf20 / Bob

[Jon Heron]

I have been using hostpapa for several years now and have not had any issues. Its cheap and has unlimited email address out of the box along with some decent tools to manage the accounts.
Cheers,
Jon

[Ohio Mike]

NameCheap They can do site registration, web hosting and email

[BCRider]

I'm not totally sure how it all works but I'd buy your website name first to get the site registered. Then find a site hosting outfit to hold onto the pages. That way if you need to migrate the site to some new site hosting outfit you keep the same name. Just need to update the domain address to point to the new hosting outfit's IP numbers.

[Paul Alciatore]

Interesting, I was thinking about one company for both services. But I see how that could be a problem in some circumstances.

[GadgetBuilder]

I've been using InMotion Hosting for about 4 years now. It's an Apache shared server controlled via cPanel. Storage is on SSD so the server is fast. I'm not very familiar with setting up a site but they have tutorials for most everything so that gets me through most things. Plus they have a helpful Support team.
Domain registration is $15/year. Hosting cost varies based on what you need and number of years you sign up for; cheapest is about $90/3 yrs (i.e. $2.50 per month) allowing 1 or 2 domains.

Email is straight forward to set up using their tutorial. They use Spam Assassin to identify SPAM but I didn't find info in their tutorial on how to tweak the weighting of the tests to make it more effective - but it is fairly clear once you realize it is possible; once adjusted it works really well.

InMotion has a shared SSL certificate which allows you to use HTTPS rather than HTTP - Google rates HTTPS sites higher.

My site is simple XHTML plus CSS so I was able to copy it from my disk to the server via FTP in less than an hour. My site was hosted on another ISP so after uploading to InMotion I verified its operation and then had them make the domain point to my site on InMotion.

[PStechPaul]

I have my web sites hosted by 1and1.com, and also use it for email. It's about $20/month, and you can get one free domain name from them. I use domain forwarding to redirect email to various domain names to one main email server, which I access using Thunderbird. It is set up to receive email to *.example.com, so I get legitimate mail as well as spam, and as many as 100 per day, most of which I delete unless the subject seems interesting. My domain names registrar is MyDomain.com, about $10-$20/year for each domain. I use Verizon FIOS for my ISP, and I have switched back and forth between that and Comcast/Xfinity. I pay about $130/month for TV, phone, and internet.

I use FileZilla for file transfers to/from my websites.

[gellfex]

My needs were minimal. I registered the domain with Godaddy and have it hosted for free on Googlesites which provides the website along with Gmail providing the domain email hosting. only catch is websites must be www.****.com format. So my page would be (not my actual site) www.gellfex.com and domain emails ****@gellfex.com (not gmail.com). You still own the domain so if you want to move on from Google to another host, no problem. I learned when we moved 25 years ago not to have my email connected to my ISP.

[Jim Stewart]

A simple choice for email is gmail.com...

-js

[Astronowanabe]

I have been lucky not to need a new email address ever (yet) but have kept the possibility in mind as eventually the sys admins who maintain mine will retire, then who knows ... the one commercial email provider I would switch to without hesitation is https://www.fastmail.com/ I doubt they host websites, I expect most web businesses are pressed to do even one thing well.

[J Tiers]

A simple choice for email is gmail.com...

-js

gmail is a known item, that seems to just work.

The downside is that google probably sells everything you type. As is usual with free services, YOU are the product they sell. I've noticed getting ads for things that have been mentioned in gmail messages. That's not "proof", but it is indicative. And it is not just gmail.

As far as I can see, anything you have ever typed into a mail message, forum response, or search engine, seems to go into a huge dossier on you that is sold to anyone who pays.

[Ohio Mike]

I'm not totally sure how it all works but I'd buy your website name first to get the site registered. Then find a site hosting outfit to hold onto the pages. That way if you need to migrate the site to some new site hosting outfit you keep the same name. Just need to update the domain address to point to the new hosting outfit's IP numbers.

You certainly need to register the domain first but you can move that domain between registration authorities fairly easily. If you are using another party for your hosting you may need to transfer the DNS to your host. Then purchase a hosting package (also create the site or buy one) and then enable mail. Mail will also requires DNS changes. This is why for a beginner I would recommend going with someone like NameCheap that can do all of these functions and has a solution for managing all this from a single web interface. If you don't understand things like Start of Authority (SOA) and MX records you can easily get lost trying to piecemeal a package together. At any point if you want to migrate any portion or all of these services someplace else that can be done.

[Paul Alciatore]

I got some time to look at this seriously today.

You seem to be saying that I should use separate companies for "domain and web hosting". I think I know that web hosting is the actual creation, storage, and running of a web site. But I may be a bit unsure about "domain". Is that simply the registration and upkeep (pay the yearly fees) for a web domain name? Or are you including other things in that? And then you talk about separating the email service.

So what are you advising should be kept separate? Domain name registration and web hosting or both of those from the email? And if domain name registration should be kept separate from web hosting, could you elaborate a bit more on why.

Most of us are going to opt for a shared server, based on dollars. The bargain basement ones like godaddy & hostgater work well for domain and web hosting (don't use the same one for each) but shared server email hosting sucks (some spam wanker gets the server blacklisted before the provider can take him down). I've left the domain names and hosting with those sorts and ended up using Zoho for email, their basic package is cheap and there is really great support. A bit futzing about on the forwarding and getting everything pointed correctly, but for me it delivers world class email and pretty good hosting, all for small dollars.