Which company to buy domain and host?

Longships

Use one of the UK hosting companies and .co.uk domain if you ONLY want UK traffic to your site. If you are hoping for a worldwide market use .com and US hosting.

As InsideInsurance says don't use the same company for your domain purchase and hosting. I use GoDaddy for domains and Hostgator among others for hosting.

I would avoid webhosting .co.uk all the sites I had with them were hacked repeatedly and they were no help in getting them restored.

dixie_dean_2

What sort of downtime is normal for a site? I'm a complete beginner (a friend helps out with most of the technical stuff) but our sites, hosted by 123 seem to down a lot of the time or people can't seem to get on them. Could this be something we're doing wrong or it it's intermittent would it have to be the host?

heathcote123

dixie_dean wrote: »

What sort of downtime is normal for a site? I'm a complete beginner (a friend helps out with most of the technical stuff) but our sites, hosted by 123 seem to down a lot of the time or people can't seem to get on them. Could this be something we're doing wrong or it it's intermittent would it have to be the host?

It's not really normal at all - very occasionally the provider may need to reboot or patch a server for maintenance, but they'll usually notifiy you first by email. Any genuine outages should usually be followed by an explanation & a grovelling apology. And yes it could be a poorly coded site rather than the host, depends what it's doing really. Best to contact tech support.

Most the discussions on here regarding web hosting seem to revolve around which hosts are the cheapest, which by it's nature means you're going to get a poorly supported crappy service on overloaded servers. I mean seriously, how much work wold you do to keep a £17 a year client?

dixie_dean_2

So in your experience/knowledge, is 123 ok? And how would we know if a poorly coded site (it uses WP) or the host? And "tech support" - 123 tech support?

heathcote123

dixie_dean wrote: »

So in your experience/knowledge, is 123 ok? And how would we know if a poorly coded site (it uses WP) or the host? And "tech support" - 123 tech support?

Personally I think they're a bit crap, I've had to deal with them on behalf of clients every now & again.

Generally to start troubleshooting the web site, you'd generally start looking through the server logs, for which you'd really need to understand how servers & web sites work (thats where tech support comes in handy) though if it's fairly straight forward wordpress, no db connections or funky scripts you've written/integrated, it's more likely to be the host.

You might want to get a bit of monitoring software for your site to leave running - pinging the server, making http (and dns) requests etc so that you can build up a picture over time of how responsive (or not) it is, and possibly the area in which the problem lies - does it become unresponsive at certain times of day for example, are the dns server unreliable etc. This may at least give you some ammo when you have to argue with the woefully underqualified minimum wage tech support staff that you will no doubt be arguing with because you spend tuppence a month on your hosting.



And yes, 123 'tech support'. I'm glad you used quotation marks.

dixie_dean_2

Excellent, thanks. Any suggestions as to what software to use to monitor the site?

warehouse

The hosting company you pick depends totally on what you intend to use the site for and how busy you expect it to be. If you pay pennies per month you will get awful support or slow loading or regular downtime because you will be a single site jammed on to a server with thousands of others.

If you use webhosting, gator, 123reg, godaddy, hostgator etc etc then good luck because to them you're a number and they couldn't really give a **** about you.

I run a forum that gets millions of page loads per month and it took me a while to find a hosting company that could cope and had the best support possible for a very good price. Their bottom end packages start at £2.99 per month with free .co.uk or .com domain name registration.

I'm not going to name them here because I'll be accused of something or other by the usual suspects, but PM me if you want their details.

heathcote123

dixie_dean wrote: »

Excellent, thanks. Any suggestions as to what software to use to monitor the site?

We use Paessler network monitor to do this kind of stuff, but we monitor a lot of things (other than web sites) and run it in house, it probably wouldn't be suitable for you.

It seems lots are offering hosted packages.. a quick google reveals sites like this:

http://www.site24x7.com/

or this:

http://www.webmetrics.com/

most seem to do a free trial or limited free monitoring. Might be an idea to try a few. I am in no way affiliated with either of these companies.

good luck.

heathcote123

warehouse wrote: »

If you use webhosting, gator, 123reg, godaddy, hostgator etc etc then good luck because to them you're a number and they couldn't really give a **** about you.

.

Can I add UK2 to that list ? there's always a feeling of impending doom when we know we have to deal with them!

lynnysinger

hi.
my husband is going to set up a website for his small business. no idea where to start. we have the name, and is available. but anyone got any advice where to go to get a website and hosting etc.
thankyou:)