Web Hosting Frustration.

[MYX]

Hey all,
I am seriously looking at finally buying my own .com. Something I have hought about for a couple of years. I am really tired of being restricted by comcasts personal webspace space. (25M) I can't do much with it. So I was wondering what you guys were using and why and if you like it.

I spent most my free time yesterday and Friday reading different services services. I am thinking about playing around with the .net stuff as I am learning (or trying to learn) VB right now and am seeing some cool stuff you can do with the .net stuff.

Several places like Yahoo! are offering a free domain name if you use their service. My only fear it that is I decided to leave their service is that the name would not then belong to me. Also, not saying that I would do this but say someone wanted to buy my WWW. .com could Yahoo! sell it to them or would they have to get permission from me, and more so, would I get the $$$ for it?

[saint]

Always always always buy and own your own domain name, then find a host for it. You want to totally be in control. Never give anyone the passwords/technical control over your domain name.

[saint]

Oh - we use 1and1 hosting and are very happy with it.

[shmokes]

I use Powweb.  Dunno if anyone has caught up, but when I bought the hosting services about a year ago nobody else could touch their price for the webspace, bandwidth and services they offer.

[billf]

MYX specifically mentioned .net and I don't see anything on the Powweb website about .net.  I have several websites hosted at easycgi.com.

[MYX]

I checked out both. I am really liking the site Saint mentioned. There is a plus there as well. If you do the business level which provides .net, you also get a set of software if you agree to stay with em for a year. Most of which I do not care about, but it does have Adobe GoLive (CS2). This means it will work wonderfully with my Photoshop CS2 and Bridge and all the other Adobe video stuff I have as well. Yeeehaw! And $7.50 a month is very reasonable.

As another plus, you get 3 domains too. This is cool so I can keep the business one seperate from the fam one.
I am curious, but is there a maximum of domains that a company will allow you to have?

[MYX]

Hey Saint,

In the terms and conditions there is a statment that if they recieve any mail that is sent to me because of my domain that I will be charged $5.00 per item. Um, how often does this happen?

[melarky]

I've posted about this before, but check out http://www.westhost.com, they have an asteroids type flash game you can play and get coupons and discounts for high scroes and such (http://games.westhost.com/hostwars/).

[MYX]

I went with the 1&1 service. After all the services I checked (which were a lot) it seemed to be the best overall package for me and the stuff I was looking for. The GoLive software was a plus. I used to use DreamWeaver, but I was never happy using Fireworks or any of the image manipulation software they had. It seemed antiuser friendly. I love how if you can get around in one adobe product, all the others are the same. Sure the design concepts change from product to product, and some folks feel that the macromedia stuff (now adobe stuff) was better. Potato - Pih tah toe.

[quarterback]

I would have posted this days ago, but I haven't been able to log onto the forums for the last 10 days.

I would, personally, stay far far away from 1&1.   Too many horror stories plus my own personal experience with their crappy interface, their odd billing and poor customer support.

You can start with their BBB info, but a quick Google of 1and1 sucks (or blows, or whatever verb you choose) will probably come up with a wealth of info about this company.   If you can't find anything, I'll find and post some links tomorrow, I gotta go to bed.

But, for now, here's their BBB info:

http://www.dc.bbb.org/report.html?national=Y&compid=1040770

Number of complaints processed by the BBB in the last 12 months: 146

They're averaging 12 Better Business Bureau complaints every month!    That should give you some idea of what this company is like.

 

[MYX]

Yeah, I am seeing it already. I signed up acouple days ago. I bought a few domains for my brother for his birthday for his company, I designed a few logos that would sit in the .com space for him to see when I called him. I went to FTP it last night and I could not get in. I called tech support and he could not get in. He said that I should check it again in a couple of hours (It was 11:30pm...1:30am???) So I got up this morning and tried to put it up again and no go. I called back in and got support and had to go through all the testing again and he finally said that it had a glitch in my account (Really...You think!?!) He got a level 2 tech and they started working on it.

Meanwhile... I was supposed to call my brother a half hour ago to wish him a happy birthday and unveil this thing.

I bought a business level account. I figured a business level account meant that you could do business with it. I mean, sure I am not paying a brazillion dollars a month, but they say 99.9% server uptime. It is because no one can get to em.

If I was doing this for a paying client, I would b up the creek right now.
I am not sure what to do. I am going to let this play out. If they get it fixed soon I will probably settle down, If not I will probably go somewhere else. My concern is that I just registered 6 domain names (3 were free with the package). Do I get to keep them. Also, I signed up for a year so I could get the Adobe software. I guess I would send that back.
They do have a 60 day money back garantee so I think I can make it work out.

I am hoping that it just resolves and I can just stay.

So the guy tells me that he can not resolve it right away and he had to run some software on it to unclog it??? It is not a friggin toilet. He said that this could take between 30 minutes and an hour. Crap, you could reload the whole opperating system in an hour. No, I am not a network engineer and I am not walking in this kids shoes. I am just frustrated. I am just worried that it would stop being worked on when I hung up. He said that he could not make outbound calls. He said he would email me. It sounded like my teenage years...Will you call me...Sure baby, uh...I call... Yeah right. 

EDIT: Oh and when I asked to speak to a manager, he said that they had no managers after 8pm. Yeah but it is 8 am. Yes sir, we are in the Philipenes. I said ok, so wait, you mean to tell me that when most of the .coms in the US are starting their day, there is no managment working? How is this possible?