Website hosting. What do you reccomend?

[ripken204]

i would go with godaddy either way b/c say you want to change your hosting down the road, all you would have to change is the nameservers for the domain name.

if you get a free domain name for whatever host you go with, then you might as well get the free domain name hosted through them.

[weEvil]

Forgive me for being a n00b. This is going to be my first website.

This is what I understand so far:

1. Get a shared hosting provider. Anhosting or Dreamhost. Depends on total final costs.

2. Register the doman. GoDaddy if they do .ca domains, otherwise I will go with a Canadian registrar.

3. The host and the registrar are independent. This means I can change my hosting company when I need something beefier and still keep my domain name.

More Questions:

I am designing the site in DreamWeaver and Fireworks.

I want the site to 'adjust' itself to the screen. Like Anadtech. In the upper right corner there are options for page width, and text size. Is this standard HTML?

Does it matter if I get a Windows or Linux host?

[Nerwin]

Well you will pay more for Windows based hosting.. So if you get Dreamhost or Anhosting, it more than likely will be Linux hosting.

I think you can set your page width to be 100 percent that way it will adjust it self.

But i'm not the best web designer in the world. lol

[ripken204]

get a linux server. unless you plan on coding in ASP i don't see any point to getting a windows server.

to get the full screen you would want to use CSS.

you can start out with a dreamweaver template if you want to..

honestly just google about this, there is plenty on it.

[Zxian]

Windows Hosting = ASP and ASP.NET pages. A lot of the large websites are starting to migrate over to ASP.NET sites because of improved performance, but the downside is the higher cost (due to licensing)

Linux Hosting = PHP, Perl, etc. These are typically what you find with large scale, cheap hosting.

I've still got my account with Dreamhost and I would highly recommend their service. Their support is quite good and the performance is generally acceptable for a personal site.

[CoffeeFiend]

Windows Hosting = ASP and ASP.NET pages. A lot of the large websites are starting to migrate over to ASP.NET sites because of improved performance, but the downside is the higher cost (due to licensing)

There's a LOT more to it than just performance. The development tools is also one of the big points. I make ASP.NET apps, so I stick to discountasp.net myself.

But yes, it's more expensive than extremely oversold PHP hosting. But that same oversold & dirt cheap LAMP hosting is enough to run a me-too personal blog with like 10 page views a month or whatever (that's what a LOT of people are doing with it)

[e-berlin]

I'm looking for a good website host.

What do you recommend in Canada?

The site I'm going to host is going to be pretty heavy on graphics, but I don't expect any major traffic for at least a year until its fully operational. So I'm looking for something that starts out cheap and is flexible.

Reputation is most important. I don't want anything shady like GoDaddy.

Is a domain name always included?

Do like I did - buy only a domain name and host it here - www.000webhost.com . COMPLETELY free, no ads, etc. Nothing like it, man, it is really "better than paid hosting" as they claim. You could also take a look at my site and check the speeds of it if you're not sure - e-berlin (www.e-berlin.org)

P.S. And after that I can help you with some technical matters if you like

[Nerwin]

Yeah free hosting is fine besides the fact that when you have a lot of images and higher bandwitdh stuff it wont work as well, I tried it when I first got my domain and it was soo slow it wasn't even funny.