[Starry Night]

G'day,

I've begun the search, amidst a sea of options, for a good web host that is affordable, very reliable, and offers great support. Doesn't have to be the cheapest, quality is more important.

Also need the host to have decent point and click WYSIWYG (I'm a newbie) editors that will also allow me to paste in html PayPal shopping cart buttons. Also must provide myname.com.

Apple suggests Bigstep.com, but they seem over-priced unless I'm missing something. $34.95 for only 100MB of space with 30GB of transfer.

Searching the net I found
hostexcellence.com which seems good and less expensive than Bigstep. Anyone deal with them before?

Any suggestions for a reliable web host that is good for inexperienced folks like myself?

Thanks!

[Avenir]

www.purenrg.com works great for me... they offer a shopping cart ,although i confess i've never used it. service and uptime is great

[clam2000]

.mac might be a good option for you.

you can create your pages using the online creator (VERY simple) and then edit them on your iDisk to add in links to paypal and what-not

just my 2 cents

--will

[Starry Night]

Originally posted by clam2000:
.mac might be a good option for you.

you can create your pages using the online creator (VERY simple) and then edit them on your iDisk to add in links to paypal and what-not

just my 2 cents

--will

I thought about .mac, but can you have your own seperate domain name? Doesn't .mac just give you 15MB of space?

As for paypal, I'd need to be able to actually access the html code (as far as I know) to paste in the buttons. You have to go to paypal, use their button creator to generate the html code, copy it, and then paste the code into your website. I have a little bit of html experience and feel I would be able to paste in the code, or at least figure out how to do it.

I'm not sure .mac can do all of that....

I'll check out the other suggestion pronto!

[clam2000]

.mac gives you up to 100 megs i believe (your entire iDisk) and you can access the html within the "sites" folder on it.

you can have your domain name route to the .mac (people could type yourdomain.com and it would display your .mac home page)

before you go with something else at least try the free trial.

--will

[Starry Night]

Originally posted by clam2000:
.mac gives you up to 100 megs i believe (your entire iDisk) and you can access the html within the "sites" folder on it.

you can have your domain name route to the .mac (people could type yourdomain.com and it would display your .mac home page)

before you go with something else at least try the free trial.

--will

Will,

You make a good point. I didn't realize they gave you 100MB of space, that's as much as Bigstep gives but charges $34.95/mo for it. And you're right, the 2 month free trial is worth giving a go.

What's the deal with routing mydomain.com to the .mac page? First I'd have to purchase/register the domain, and then hire a service to route it to .mac? What does the re-direct cost?

Will the .mac page be fully compatible with people accessing it via windows pc's?

Thanks!

[redJag]

any decent registrar (the person you order the domain from) will have auto-redirects. A domain name without a redirect is useless. You just need the domain name server from Apple (I've never used .mac, dunnno where to find this) or if they give out static IPs..

[macnnhelpme]

Man, web hosting is so cheap there are a ton of good options out there. Just go to HostSearch and find what you're looking for.

[Starry Night]

Originally posted by macnnhelpme:
Man, web hosting is so cheap there are a ton of good options out there. Just go to HostSearch and find what you're looking for.

That's the thing, there are *too* many choices It's difficult to determine who is reliable and who isn't.... I'll call Apple today and get more specifics on .mac...

[Synotic]

http://www.phpwebhosting.com/

1 plan, 10 bucks a month, 125 MB, unmetered bandwidth (within reason), SSH, FTP, PHP, MySQL etc... <strike>Comes with a domain name.</strike> 30 day guarantee. Good service from what I hear. Be sure to give it a try. Just a bit more expensive than .mac but a hundred times better.

I just found out that it doesn't give you a domain. But you can get one from PowerPipe for 8 bucks a year, less than a dollar per month.

BTW having a domain redirect or a page within a giant frame looks really unprofessional to me Unless it's just meant to be easier to to remember.

[Starry Night]

Originally posted by Synotic:
http://www.phpwebhosting.com/

1 plan, 10 bucks a month, 125 MB, unmetered bandwidth (within reason), SSH, FTP, PHP, MySQL etc... <strike>Comes with a domain name.</strike> 30 day guarantee. Good service from what I hear. Be sure to give it a try. Just a bit more expensive than .mac but a hundred times better.

I just found out that it doesn't give you a domain. But you can get one from PowerPipe for 8 bucks a year, less than a dollar per month.

BTW having a domain redirect or a page within a giant frame looks really unprofessional to me Unless it's just meant to be easier to to remember.

G'day,

Thanks for all of the suggestions. PHB looks good as well, yet at only 125MB of storage space for $9.95, you get more bang for your buck elsewhere. I read the fine print, their "unlimited transfer" actually translates into 5GB/month. If you go a little over every once in awhile, they don't mind, but if you consistently go over then there will be a charge.

After many hours of research, to the point that I'm tired of researching , I'm leaning towards hostexcellence.com. For $9.95 you get 1000MB of space + 10GB of transfer. If you go over the transfer limit they gently remind you to upgrade your plan rather than pop a surprise big bill on you. They also include the online browser based WYSIWYG template html editor called Site Studio. $16.95/month gets 5000MB of space and larger transfer, plus the ability to host 5 sites on the same account.

But the $9.95 plan will be plenty for me. .Mac would probably work ok, but it would look a little unprofessional. And for only slightly more per month, like $1.50 more, I get much much more versatility and ten times the space with Host Excellence.

Also, I sent several inquiry emails to a number of different web hosts. Every time, Host Excellence was the first to respond, usually w/in a few hours.

Thanks again for the advice!

[fromthecloud]

I have my hosting through Host Rocket.

For $9.95 a month I get:

1000 MB of storage
50 GB of transfer
Unlimeted E-mail accounts
Unlimeted Aliases
Unlimeted Autoresponders
PHP 4.3.1 w/ Zend
CGI-BIN
Perl 5.6.1
MySQL (10 Databases)
Unlimited FTP Accounts
Unlimited Telnet
Unlimeted SSH
Anonymous FTP
Free SSL Support
Unlimited Subdomains
Park up to 10 Domains
Free Perl Module Installation
Imagemagik 5.5.2
GD 2.0.9

It's a great deal. The serivce has been superb. All my emails have been answered within 24 hours and many times much more quickly. They are very professional and their data center and equipment are excellent.

There should be a link in my sig.

Hope this helps.

[waffffffle]

I use powweb.com

650 MB Storage
45 GB/month transfer
PHP, MySQL, CGI
650 Email addresses (either POP/IMAP or forwarders)

$7.77 per month

They don't have site creation tools though. So far I have been very happy with their service.

[Starry Night]

Originally posted by waffffffle:
I use powweb.com

650 MB Storage
45 GB/month transfer
PHP, MySQL, CGI
650 Email addresses (either POP/IMAP or forwarders)

$7.77 per month

They don't have site creation tools though. So far I have been very happy with their service.

After quizing Host Excellence bit more, they now say that in using their Site Studio (Positive Software) templates you can't access the html code. Thus w/Site Studio I couldn't add the PayPal html code shopping cart buttons. I'd have to set up the site with Site Studio and then use some other html editor to access the code and paste in the paypal code.

I wonder if BBedit would work for something like that and be somewhat easy to use?

Or Dreamweaver for OSX and just forget about the Site Studio stuff?

[clam2000]

dreamweaver is probably a good bet. the split window feature is nice for what you are doing, where most of the time you are not editing the code, but sometimes you need to paste stuff in.

--will

[Love Calm Quiet]

I wonder how many sources use Apple Servers. My (non-Apple) Mac store just referred me to a guy offering UNLIMITED space and using Apple servers, FWIW (if you want to support them):
- Unlimited Web Space

- Webmail @yourdomain.com

- 5 Email Accounts @yourdomain.com

- Secure Mac OS X Unix Servers

- Apache, Webstar

- Fast T-1 Access

- PHP enabled

- Guaranteed 99.9% Up time

http://www.webscouts.net/

[Starry Night]

Originally posted by clam2000:
dreamweaver is probably a good bet. the split window feature is nice for what you are doing, where most of the time you are not editing the code, but sometimes you need to paste stuff in.

--will

Dreamweaver does look awesome, and cost no object I'd just get it. However, at $369, I'm inspired to look for less expensive avenues and will turn to Dreamweaver as a last resort.

Host Excellence's "Site Studio" will take care of the WYSIWYG part and is included free of charge with the service. They said I need to "simply use a html editor to access the code and paste in html."

Is there some sort of mac freeware or at least less expensive software that will allow me to easily access and edit Site Studio's html code?

I admit, I'm at the very outer edge of my knowledge, looking over an abyss of things I know very little about. But I can learn!

Any suggestions?

[fromthecloud]

BBEdit works very well for what you are talking about. It has the capability to open and directly edit files on an FTP server (perfect for just pasting in some code).

It's also the greatest text/html/programming environment I have ever used.

[Starry Night]

Originally posted by fromthecloud:
BBEdit works very well for what you are talking about. It has the capability to open and directly edit files on an FTP server (perfect for just pasting in some code).

It's also the greatest text/html/programming environment I have ever used.

Ah, the clouds

Is there still a BBEdit lite? Would that do the simple task I need? I looked at the barebones website and couldn't find BBedit lite anywhere. The current full fledged BBEdit is going for $179. While I'm sure it's a great application, it's a lot to pay to be able to paste a few lines of html code here and there.

There must be some low cost editor for mac, or am I dreaming?

Thanks!

[Starry Night]

What about Mozilla? Did a search and some obscure discussion group had a reference that Mozilla has a basic html editor built into it's browser.

I wonder if that would work?

[waffffffle]

Originally posted by Starry Night:
After quizing Host Excellence bit more, they now say that in using their Site Studio (Positive Software) templates you can't access the html code. Thus w/Site Studio I couldn't add the PayPal html code shopping cart buttons. I'd have to set up the site with Site Studio and then use some other html editor to access the code and paste in the paypal code.

I wonder if BBedit would work for something like that and be somewhat easy to use?

Or Dreamweaver for OSX and just forget about the Site Studio stuff?

The site that I have hosted on Powweb is www.lastweekmusic.com and if you notice, our online store uses PayPal buttons.

I use BBEdit Lite and Fetch together sometimes. Fetch is free (for EDU users anyways) and I still have a copy of BBEdit Lite from a while back that integrates nicely with Fetch. In Fetch you can "Edit File in BBEdit" which launches BBEdit to open the file and every time you save changes in BBEdit, BBEdit uploads the new file to the server. It is a very nice solution, but unfortunately there is no WYSIWYG editor, for those who want it.

[waffffffle]

Originally posted by Starry Night:
Ah, the clouds

Is there still a BBEdit lite? Would that do the simple task I need? I looked at the barebones website and couldn't find BBedit lite anywhere. The current full fledged BBEdit is going for $179. While I'm sure it's a great application, it's a lot to pay to be able to paste a few lines of html code here and there.

There must be some low cost editor for mac, or am I dreaming?

Thanks!

If you know where to look:

ftp://ftp.barebones.com/pub/freeware...te_612.smi.hqx

[Starry Night]

Originally posted by waffffffle:
If you know where to look:

ftp://ftp.barebones.com/pub/freeware...te_612.smi.hqx

Thanks for the link. Last month a kind person off one of these discussion sites sent me a CD of their favorite downloads. Looked through the CD yesterday, and sure enough, there was a copy of BBEdit Lite 6.1.2.smi.

I did more playing around with Host Excellence's online browser called Site Studio produced by Positive Software.

Using the demo I found out it's quite easy to enter html code direclty into the WYSIWYG editor's input windows. Essentially, you can type in code where-ever you want without leaving the WYSIWYG editor. Site Studio has a lot of features, including catalog templates, perfect for what I want to do.

Apparently the customer service agent wasn't entirely familiar with all the features of Site Studio. Best of all, Site Studio comes free with each account. I've seen other hosts charge $119/yr extra just for the program.

Given I don't have Dreamweaver nor am inclined to invest in it right now, Host Excellence meets all my needs. Good bang for the buck plus an easy to use, yet capable, WYSIWYG editor that accepts code.

I'll let ya'll know how it goes!

Thanks

[Starry Night]

Howdy,

Yet another potential solution is Macromedia's Contribute 2. It's sort of a Dreamweaver lite that uses the WYSIWYG format to edit existing html websites. It even has a specific feature for setting up Paypal buttons. At only $99, not a bad price, and claims OSX support.

I just wonder if it makes a difference if your website is created with an online browser based editor like Site Studio. The files are on their server, not on my hard drive. I wonder if Contribute 2 can still edit those existing html files even though they only exist online?

Does anyone know?

[macupdate]

I can get you 50% off the hosting packages at Host Solutions:

www.hostsolutions.com

Starting at $9.97/month for 100MB of space. It's the same people behind MacUpdate.com, so you know you're in good hands.

[Starry Night]

Originally posted by macupdate:
I can get you 50% off the hosting packages at Host Solutions:

www.hostsolutions.com

Starting at $9.97/month for 100MB of space. It's the same people behind MacUpdate.com, so you know you're in good hands.

Thanks for the offer, but I'm going to start with Host Excellence simply because they provide free browser based website developement software. That saves me having to buy something like Dreamweaver. And at $4.95/mo for 100MB of space, with easy upgrade paths, I think it will meet all my needs..........