Hosting and more

[shrek]

So questions for the geeks here:

1) What is your favourite hosting site. What does it offer and how much does it cost.

2) I want an ASP hoster with database (unlimited bandwidth preferred). Any suggestions

3) Do you host adverts on any site. What makes you the most money? Any tips?

4) If I want to start say an online business (e.g. even something like mybindi.com) what are the legalities?

5) Is it difficult to get something set up to charge people for an online service .. i.e. billing their visa cards.

6) Is it really possible to start an online business ALONE (assuming I am a geek but no nothing about legal/business)?

[Pir8]

I used to be with phpwebhosting.com back in the day, they offered a pretty sweet deal. For $9.95 you got a lot of stuff. Check their site out. I don't host with them anymore as I lease a few servers of my own for personal use and for my clients. But with phpwebhosting, there were no complains, their servers were very stable, and never had any issues with their service. Their support is not through phone but it is pretty quick regardless. They offer a lot of things for $9.95, it still seems like a pretty good deal. Their Control Panel wasn't all that great, some other hosting providers integrate a lot of things into the control panel which some folks like because of its ease of use and quick access. You can check out www.vortechhosting.com as well as www.websitesource.net. For an extensive list of hosts and things they provide check www.tophosts.com

If you want to offer online transactions you can use services like 2checkout or internet secure which offer third party payment services for a per transaction fee. I've had a few customers who have used these services. This takes away from you having to manage the credit card billing. This also goes away from you requiring to get a merchant account, which from what some people have told me is not an easy thing to do, and a bit expensive as well.

If you are going to host adverts you could always go with those adclick services or google ads lets say, otherwise you can create your own advert application and integrate it within your site (much time consuming).

These days anyone can start an online business, you just have to do something better then the next guy...

Just my two cents.

[slush]

1) What is your favourite hosting site. What does it offer and how much does it cost.

if you're not running your own, i'd find and go with the best value. i know alentus.com is supposed to be one of the best

2) I want an ASP hoster with database (unlimited bandwidth preferred). Any suggestions

unlimited bandwidth is a touchy subject. if you pay next to nothing for it, you'll get nothing if you actually ever use it... ie., your site will crawl into a hole into and die. it's better to estimate how much you'll run. a few hundred gigs/mo will at least get you an idea of what you need in the first month an you can have a truer adjustment

3) Do you host adverts on any site. What makes you the most money? Any tips?

i stay away from advertising, except any advertising i do on google

4) If I want to start say an online business (e.g. even something like mybindi.com) what are the legalities?

seperate bank account, preferably incorporated, a good terms of service (you can learn from other sites for the most part), a lawyer friend, and that's about all

5) Is it difficult to get something set up to charge people for an online service .. i.e. billing their visa cards.

no, there's lots of recurring credit card billers around that charge per transaction, and not per month. it's a bit more up front, once you build up your transactions you can switch over to a real plan. 2checkout, paypal, and even google checkout do it from what i remember

6) Is it really possible to start an online business ALONE (assuming I am a geek but no nothing about legal/business)?

ideas are a dime a dozen, being able to launch something is another thing. doing it alone will mean you do half the features just as well. you can't over look legal/business, its easier with two, or three like minded people that make the pie grow at least twice or three times the size. if you have to go it alone, keep it simple and something you can learn/do all the things for.

don't be too worried about success if you need to learn the ropes, that's a big enough lesson to learn. anyone who hops in to the online service world now and works at it has a good chance of bypassing having to earn a living once their service is setup..

[padawan]

Also if you can some similar sites that you think you want the set-up for have a look. This site here that may help:

http://news.netcraft.com/

So for example if you wanted to see who is hosting history for say retail-sucks.com, simply type in URL in the "What's that site running?..." box. it gives you report on who is hosting the site, what OS it uses, type of web sever - never know could be useful - or useless info.

I whole-heatedly agree with this "unlimited bandwidth" issue. Hosts that provide unlimited bandwidth/space are normally false advertising. Why?
In one case I had found a host that provided unlimited bandwidth, after reviewing their TOS (Terms of Service) closer I noticed that it was for sites that had text only!!!! (freakin' crooks!)

Finally as for using PayPal - the only type of set-up I have been involved in (briefly) was something that was similar to this PayPal set-up below:

http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/str/gr/ppchkoutdemo1.gif
from: http://help.yahoo.com/us/store/order/paypal/paypal-14.html (Yahoo Small Business solutions)

That may give you a model on how to start your charging for online service.

Also check out Google adwords for online advertising:
https://adwords.google.com/select/Login - never used it myself, but co-worker of mine is using it to start his small photography business - he says its great

But in the end while tech know how is important, the business idea is what counts - of that can't really ask geeks for help on that - much :)

[shrek]

I know about Google advertising. I have earned $20 over a long time for my website http://HinduOrgs.com (though have spent much more on it).

Padawan thanks for the netcraft link .. extremely helpful.

Pir8 you mentioned you lease servers .. can you give me details please.

[Pir8]

Shrek, yeah I have an account with a hosting provider that allows me to offer hosting services to my clients. Most of my clients are small-medium sized businesses and we setup hosting, database etc for them. What you are looking for in terms of hosting, we don't offer it for an affordable price...but I am pretty sure there are others out there that can provide the same services that you want for a much more competitive price.

What did you want to know about the servers that we lease? We have access to both windows and unix servers, so if a client wants windows (.NET) hosting then we can easily set them up for that, or if they want Unix (php) we can easily set those up...we also have access to ms-sql and mysql databases and I believe postgres is available as well for an additional fee. There is also access to Coldfusion but who the fsck uses that pfft.... :)