Thread: No experience, looking for a host

I have no site building experience and I'm not a coder. I want to be able to get a site up and running pretty quickly with a discussion forum, photo gallery, a news and info page, and some blogging. The plan is to gradually learn HTML and whatever else I can use to make the site more sophisticated over time.

First, what will I'm sure be a stupid questions, but I see hosts that are windows based, linux based, etc. Does the fact that I run windows on my PC have anything to do with that? In other words, if I'm running Windows, can I use a Linux based host? I think so, but I want to be sure.

I expect fairly light traffic initially, with gradual build from there.

So I'm looking for a host that is:

1. Reliable.
2. Has easy to install tools to get a rookie up and running, but will also allow me to utilize other tools/programs as I learn.
3. Will allow me to grow over time, until its time to go dedicated.
4. Some basic ecommerce ability.

At this point, my leading choices are HostGator and ANHosting, but I'm open to other suggestions.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Hostgator has always been good to us! Their customer support is amazing, they have the live chat to help you with issues which is always good when your first starting out and they have fantastico which will have alot of scripts like a forum script easy to install in their hosting package for you. We have also had zero downtime sinc estarting our account with them almost 2 years ago now. Thats my hostgator opinion. Good luck with it all :-)

Thanks!

Do you know what forum(s) they offer? PHPBB?

Fyi, I'm trying to ask questions directly on their support board but haven't been able to yet. Supposedly I can post on the Pre-sale board without registering, but when I try it says I need to register, which I can't since I don't have an existing HG account. I've sent an email to them to look into it. The live chat also didn't work on my work computer. Not good signs imo, but not serious at this point. At least they offer these things.

I was also poking around on the net and I read that with Fantastico you don't always get automatic updates when new versions of the scripts come out. Do you know if that's true? Does HG offer a forum outside of Fantastico? I didn't see it listed in their features.

Thanks again for any help. I do appreciate it.

Hey, planning to launch a webhosting site soon and already got forum for support up and i offer varius instant messengers to support the hostee's as well. Got 100% uptime since i bought my reseller and i can give you some hosting, what kind of space/bw do you need?

I host my forum (vBulletin based) on Hostgator and the prob is, you cant send more than 200 emails per hour, so if you have a big community u want to mass mail / pm to, you cant.

Some shameless promotion here.

I sell hosting.
The company I resell hosting for, been using them for about a year now.
Most of the time, sites are up, except when they move to better servers (3 times so far that I know of) or they have server problems.
They have always answered my questions and taken care of me and my customers.

Very reasonable prices for good bandwidth and storage.

Oh, they update fantastico in a timely fashion.

Check me out at: Dawg Hosting

I like siteground.com - never had any problems at all; in 2 years, hotsing multiple sites.

Although i have never tried Hostgator, i hear good things

Originally Posted by DomainZaar

I like siteground.com - never had any problems at all; in 2 years, hotsing multiple sites.

Although i have never tried Hostgator, i hear good things

Yep, siteground also specializes in vbulletin hosting and so far we've had no problems.

I am sorry if I am not allowed to do it but my business just opened its hosing part and is offering intro signups for new customers.

You can review our packages and features at www.shoscape.com and email me if you wanna sign up.

My email is bbenway@shoscape.com and we are giving 50% off to all new signups.

I used 3ix.com for my test hosting. I found that it is cheapest but reliable.