budget web hosting

the advisability of using very cheap hosts

[sjon]

Hello.

Since it's just been pointed out to me that individual hosting companies cannot be discussed, can anyone give me an idea of the advisability of using very cheap hosts in general? I'm talking about $2-3 per month. I imagine that a major difference is the amount of extras they include, but is there anything else I should know? Can there be much difference between a company that will charge me $3 and one that charges $5?

Thanks.

[Larryhat]

$3/month! Ooof. I'm paying $7/month. Everything went fine, good service etc. Then I learned that all mail to my domain ****[e-mail] was being blocked by my (separate) dial-up ISP. I inquired there. It turned out that my Host ISP email servers were all blocked because they were a major spam pipeline!

So, emails to webmaster(etc)@mydomain.net were not even bounced, but simply erased without notice to anyone!

I had to change every mailto: type link on my site, plus all the people and forums I write to. A major drag.

I paid ahead a year and am considering a change. I definitely don't want any junk, banner ads etc., and expect good fast reliable service.

I'm well within the 2.5 GB/month bandwidth, and use a fraction of the 70 MB allotted file space. Anyone with recommendations is asked to sticky me.

Thanks in advance - LH

[topr8]

downtime and bandwidth are two things to look out for, but many cheap hosts are great if you are just serving up basic pages.

a good thing to do is spend some time searching on terms like...

'webhost name' sucks (etc etc) this way you should come across some angry customers and at least find out your worst case scenario.

[vrtlw]

Then I learned that all mail to my domain ****[e-mail] was being blocked by my (separate) dial-up ISP. I inquired there. It turned out that my Host ISP email servers were all blocked because they were a major spam pipeline!

I'm just wondering how your ISP would be blocking Email to your (seperate) hosting account. Perhaps they chant some Mantra to influence external companies or am I missing something?

[Larryhat]

Hello VRTLW:

Simple! My dial-up ISP got a list of SPAM servers from two sources (they tell me), Spamhaus and another like that. They block ALL incoming email from those servers, including the email servers at my Host ISP.

They do not bounce emails, but erase them entirely as if they never existed. -LH

[Jack_Hughes]

really depends on the value of what you are doing. if you are doing a high value website then surely it deserves a good home. if you are not doing anything of high value, then why bother doing it in the first place.

[high value doesn't necessarily mean moneywise, value to you I mean]