Need Advice: Very Reliable Email, IMAP, Storage, Small B2b Business
Apr 2, 2008
I'm looking for quality hosting at the right price for a small business. I have been searching these forums, but just got no conclusion, and would appreciate any advice concerning 'features' and 'providers' that I shall look at or avoid.
My needs are:
- very reliable email, with IMAP, good spam filtering, and ability to handle Challenge Response type system;
- rSync and storage of company internal documents (intranet like);
- host a small static website of a small b2b company, with little but valuable traffic;
- handle multiple (non limited) addon domains;
- for the near future: mysql, Ruby on Rails (need to explore it), Python and a good Content Management System;
- good stats tracking tools -- ability to log a list of sessions would be great;
- control panel doesn't matter, ssh would be nice;
- datacenter location doesn't matter too much, connectivity, reliability, and uptime do;
- 5~10GB storage mainly email and internal docs;
- 1GB traffic mainly email;
- preferably with a community forum - I trust more on those who have it, and have nothing to hide;
Do you think I can get something reliable for under $10/month or $100/year ?
I have found these options:
GeekStorage - looks great, LiteSpeed is appealing, people behind it look experienced, I was almost signing for it when I was caught by several issues with long downtimes (over 24h) during the last 2 months;
MediaLayer - also offers LiteSpeed, good comments by many on here, but no listed prices - why hidding the prices? are they trying to screw our bucks? that doesn't sound good to me;
HostGator and LunarPages - very popular, but they don't seem the thing for me, maybe for those with blogs, forums, or GoogleAds oriented websites, I get puzzled how can they offer 600GB for $7.95/month !?
FusedNetwork, Steadfast, DowntownHost and many others - seem to be oriented to lower storage and higher traffic, the opposite of my case.
I know I can get dedicated storage services, but a large amount of my storage need is for email which need to be synchronized through IMAP. BTW, can IMAP be used to synchronize files beyond messages?
I just joined this forum because I want to let as many people as possible know about a horrible experience that I had with my last small business web hosting company: LogicWeb.
Then I would love to hear other people's horror stories about companies they hate and praises about companies they like.
Let me just say that I had originally signed up with another company that was bought by LogicWeb. I had their VPS package and the biggest problem was the customer service which used to be good under the other company. Run into a little problem, send them an email and have to wait three days for a response. A response that generally said something like "we don't cover that."
So, anyhow, I found another small business web hosting company and then tried to cancel with LogicWeb. Sent them email after email and I was still getting billed. Finally, I found their cancellation form buried on their site and submitted a cancellation with a note stating that I had sent several emails trying to cancel.
A couple of weeks later, I get another bill in my email box so I decide to call them up. I'm on the phone with a guy and tell him that I have been trying to cancel for three months and the first thing he says is, "I don't think you're being honest."
"What?" I say not believing that that could be the first thing he says to me. "I think you're lying."
"Well, I'm not lying and I resent this conversation so far."
"Well, you are lying. It's only been two months since you stopped using our system."
"So, because I'm off by one month, you call me a liar?"
"Yes, because liars lie!"
I couldn't believe it! I couldn't believe that any small business web hosting service would call their client a liar even if they were lying. So, I made a mistake and got pissed and cursed!
"I can't believe you're calling me a ****ing liar! I've never ever been called a liar before. Let me speak to your supervisor!"
"Well, I'm the owner and I'm recording this conversation and if you're going to use foul language with me then I'll just report you to my collections department!"
I say, "Let me get this straight. You say that I'm lying and call me a liar, something no business person should ever do to a client, and just because I say '****ing' because I'm insulted, you're pissed at me? Well, if you are going to hang up on me then let me just finish with this... you are a ****ing *******!"
I don't know how much worse a business owner can act with a customer and I highly recommend avoiding LogicWeb since they are the worst small business web hosting around.
It is looking like I am going to have to leave IX hosting. They have a bandwidth problem on my shared server that they cannot seem to solve. I am experiencing slow loading & slow interactive features. Ping times can exceed 500ms during peak hours EST. I have run tracerts that show them specifically that the bottleneck is between thier server and quest-comm and they still cant seem to get a handle on it. This has been going on for a month and I have given them till tuesday.
So, this leaves me to prepare to move my clients' sites UGH! My parameters are somewhat unique which makes it a little tougher to pick a new host. My clients sites are all small local business sites ranging from 5 to 60 pages. I need very little storage space and I use very little bandwidth. However, I do need unlimited domains, ASP support and I really like IX's web shell feature. I will also be doing some e-commerce in the near futures.
I am spending a paltry 7.95 per month with IX. I may spend as much as $20 per month for the right service. Beyond my afformentioned specific requirments, I want a host that is established, proven reliable, in the states, has their own real bricks and mortar facility and a stellar reputation with the experienced web guys.
I have contacted a few that I have seen mentioned here but many dont support ASP and many require a dedicated server deal to host unlimited domains, which of course, is outside my cost requirements.
I'm base in Singapore. Most of my customers from US and UK.
I need a reliable trustworthy webhost that can make my site payment methods by Enets which i dont really understand their policy and paypal (which i know that almost all virtual webhost do support) .
I had been doing a nice host hunting and here are too many webhost offers that are "too good to be true".
I am the intern at a company that wants to install server. They just opened two new offices in Cali and Texas. The main office is here in Pittsburgh. Can anyone give me the name of companies that will help install this server, and details on what I need for the server?
Very new....need a webhost for my 2 small businesses:
business 1: consulting. need to put up examples of my work that are photo heavy & graphic heavy. would like to use a diy template like rvsitebuilder or something similar business 2: ecommerce...something easy to use as i am not tech savy i've researched and inmotion has a lot of good reviews, but sitebuilder does not seem that customizable. Also found Arvixe, but not true 24/7 support....
Also, being able to send large files through email is important.
I have set up Windows Small Business Server 2003 and was testing it over the past week. Everything has been going well and yesterday it requested to install an update (not to sure what it was now) and soon after the update was installed a restart was required.
After the server shutdown and tried to restart the system will not restart.
The machine powers up and then I am faced with a blank black screen (no load bar nothing). The monitor led light flashes from green to orange then to a static green light after the Dell splash screen.
I can load up into safe mode although I do not know how to work out what is wrong. I am guessing the update has caused the issue, possibly a boot sector needs repairing. There are no new additions to control panel -> install/remove programs which i believe is where all updates can be uninstalled from.
I've been poking around here for a few evenings trying to find someone else who's asked just the same question I need to ask, but I'm not really seeing it.
My situation is this. I am writing a website in ASP.Net 2.0 for a small business. I do web development for a living, so the database admin, asp/vb.net coding is not an issue. However, I've never dealt with the hosting side of things.
I need the following:
1) ability to host two different domains using some shared DLLs that provide funtionality used by both sites. I've read that some hosting companies won't let you put DLLs on their servers, so I'm not sure if I can do this.
2) Ability to send and recieve e-mails at "mydomain.com". I think this is a no-brainer.
3) Ability to use SQL Server express.
4) We will be taking orders with credit card numbers, so I need to be able to do HTTPS and I need to know my data will be secure.
5) obviously, I need a server that has the .Net 2.0 framework on it.
problem I was having which was Windows Small Business Server 2003 would hang on boot up. I never got the time to reinstall the server until now.
I have installed the server and applied all updates. This worked fine until I install the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 or 2. When I install SP1 or SP2 on reboot the server loads the Dell splash screen then the monitor LED light goes orange then green then orange and then just hangs with a blank screen.
I can boot into Safe Mode and uninstall the Service Pack and I can then reboot without any problems. I have installed ADAM SP1.
I am currently facing a move from my existing web host, as they are altogether incompetent. Four of the last five days, my site has either been down, showing a suspended page, or redirecting to the main page of the host. (I am a legitimate business - not selling penis enlargement supplements)
So now, I need a good host, who will provide maximum value for dollar spent. My requirements are fairly simple. I need 5 SQL databases, the ability to install and configure a CMS of my choosing, and a site that is based in the US. (I need my site to be US based and listed, for very specific reasons)
I have used Rochen in the past, and am very happy with them. However, I want my sites on a different host, as several of my other sites are cross linked.
Finding services in such a competitive field is overwhelming. It's getting too hard to cut through the BS.
I am a customer of Yahoo Small Business unlimited hosting. I am running Joomla (CMS) with jreviews which uses PHP and MySQL. I now need to expand my review and rating website to earn some profits. According to my business plan, I would need atleast a 1000-2000 unique visitors a day to actually earn off the website to afford a VPS. My question is, can Yahoo Small Business "Unlimited" hosting plan sustain that number under the usage of Joomla? I have been trying to find an answer to this for a long long time but to no avail. I know that "unlimited" is actually a marketing tactic and that one must move to VPS or Dedicated servers for serious traffic. But I cannot move to a VPS before I earn something from the website initially due to lack of funds. Can I expect to be tension free till the range of 1000-2000 uniques/day?
My client would like to go for a real hosting company. However, he has some concerns about his archived emails. He want to move all those email to the host.
I've just passed the 6 month mark with Hawkhost this week. I signed up with a coupon that was floating around that made the deal hard to pass up.
I have a small business shopping cart based site that receives an average of 70 visitors/day which uses 40MB bandwidth/day or roughly 1GB/month. I'm on the standard package which currently gives me 3GB/month storage and 30GB/month bandwidth. It's not a large site by any means, but I need it to be up 24/7. I also have 4 domain add-ons, but they get very little traffic. FYI, I have my domains registered with godaddy.
The first week I opened a ticket requesting that ssh be enabled. My ticket was updated with a "we're on it" response after one minute, which appeared to be from an actual human, followed by a resolution 2 minutes after the ticket was opened.
Later the same day I submitted another ticket regarding setting up email in a particular email client - that was responded to and resolved in 5 minutes.
A month later I had an email bounce issue that I needed some help investigating. Two hours later it was responded to and resolved.
Since then I haven't had to contact support. I have a monitoring alert system to notify me of any downtime. It's alerted me one time in six months and by the time I sat down at the computer to check, my site was back up. With my previous host, it happened on what seemed like a bi-weekly basis.
I just referred somebody to sign up with hawkhost today - something I'd be worried about in the past with other hosts.
I have no complaints to speak of and it's tough to beat the price/reliability ratio. Keep up the good work!
Friend of mine is starting up a business and is looking for a reliable and fast web host in the UK but also not too expensive around £100/year and maybe 100gb bandwidth not sure on that.
Looked over reviewcentre.com and picked out some high rated ones with more than 5 reviews, however every single one I have read horror stories about elsewhere (including ukfast which seemed so good looking at reviews).
Can someone recommend any decent ones to me who won't screw up payments or have much downtime, with maybe a year or more of being with them? All I need to start is a bit of bandwidth for pretty much one image to start with, uptime and email, already got the domain from domainmonster.
Can I use this edition for hosting on dedicated server, and how does it compare to the enterprise edition ? Can it be used with hosting? The web edition sucks as I can not install ms sql on it, so it is useless. Anyone use sbs server to host his website, because most of the link i read never mention it for hosting, and only for print sharing/ filesharing/ business applications, but where is it's use for hosting?
So what do you think ? IO looked at its infor and it did not provide much?
Just got a letter from InMotion. They don't like I uploaded my backup files to them, which makes their hosting benefits totally pointless to me and I will be moving to some other cheaper hosting since I basically only use email.
So I need some place to store my backups... I need only about 5 Gb, and I don't care about bandwidth, as I don't plan to download them unless all my HDDs will burn or get stolen or something so I don't need bandwidth. And it should be no more than few bucks/mo.
My problem is like this, I try to transfer an account from my old host to new host. This is how I do, I download all the file using ftp and upload all the file to new host.
Then I found that, website ok, email account created, database ok.. but IMAP email is gone ...
I work for a company who is wanting to provide email accounts for about 300 users. There doesn't need to be any bells or whistles, only the ability to send and receive email. In fact, there probably won't be an enormous amount of activity on the accounts, though it could grow in time.
I'm a newbie at this and am unaware of all the available options. My first thought was to consider web hosting.
It seems like there are a hundred companies out there offering unlimited mailboxes for shared web hosting accounts. After some investigation, I saw that alot of these companies limit the sent emails to 250 an hour. This seems too low for comfort.
I started looking at VPS and Dedicated Servers and they seem to be a little more reasonable. Most of these hosting companies offered some type of squirrel mail or imp client, which would work fine.
Am I heading down the right track using a VPS or Dedicated Server at a company like inmotion? Did I misunderstand the 250 per hour limit? Could a shared hosting plan work comfortably for 300 active email accounts?
I've heard Exchange and Google Apps are popular, but after a cursory glance, they seem quite expensive for our needs (but maybe someone can explain why they are worth a closer look).
Is anyone else out there hosting IMAP email with MediaTemple? I am trying to transfer IMAP accounts to MediaTemple after switching from an email only provider, MailSnare. I use Mac Mail as my email client and am having trouble getting my accounts set up properly. It seems to have to do with my path to IMAP.
I've tried everything including:
(blank) /mail mail/ mail INBOX. INBOX
Different techs at mediatemple told me to use /mail and INBOX. but neither work properly. For the most part, I have been able to see my mail, but not my folders, or not all of my folders, or I've gotten repeated warnings that IMAP command "SELECT" failed. In one of my accounts now I can't see the mail at all, but the account is telling me there is 1 unread message. My problem seems to have been complicated by all the messing around with the preferences trying to fix things. If it makes any difference, the email address for the account is the same as it was with my previous host. I wonder if that's causing a problem when trying to access the mail in Library/Mail?
I have a couple questions maybe some of you can help me with -
I have a dedicated server and many hosted customers, I want to setup SSL for IMAP email and their cpanels.
Instead of purchasing individual SSL certificates for each domain. I was thinking to just use my hostanme (eg host.myhostname.net) and direct them to that as I have seen the option in WHM.
My question is can I use an SSL cert for email that will act as a "fleetwide" SSL cert?
For example instead of using mail.theirdomain.com could I just use mail.myhostname.com and would it give them SSL without warnings? Of course they would set their email client to mail.myhostname.com..
Is it safe or recommend to use your hostname? I read somewhere to never use your hostname as a domain.. so not sure.
I have a client with a dedicated server running. Spec below.
The problem I am having is with incoming email. When I set up a new email account it can take about 10 attempts to log on to the incoming mail server. Once it has connected it will be ok for a short while then I will get a connection error and no emails will come through.
This is happening across all platforms, PC / MAC / iPhone and iPad.
I am a web designer with limited knowledge of the setting up of the server and was looking to set up email server within plesk.
General CPUGenuineIntel, Intel(R)Core(TM) i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz VersionParallels Plesk Panel v11.0.9_build110120608.16 os_Ubuntu 12.04 OSUbuntu 12.04.4 LTS Key numberPLSK.02873817.0002 System Uptime: 60 day(s) 10:03
Hostname IP address OSUbuntu 12.04.4 LTS Panel version11.0.9 Update #62
I'm having trouble with horde it is giving me the following error:
Auth_imap: Required IMAP extension not found.
Now I pretty much know why that error is coming up I'm missing the IMAP module. What I don't understand is if it was their before why is it gone now. The last thing I did on the server was upgrade Perl.
I would like to get rid of this error but I'm afraid the only solutions will wipe my current setup. If of course their is a way to fix this error without ruining my current setup that would be a lot more useful
The main thing I want to do is retrieve an address book from the horde server. How would I go about finding where the address book is stored through the command line.
I'm completely torn on going the absolute budget route vs spending more for something that'll allow easy upgradeability in the future. I basically need lots of space but file sending-- media like mp3s, video, etc.
it'll be raid 5 and I'll need at least 2-3TB initially but the ability to expand would be nice.
option 1: nice chassis with plenty of hotswap bays with sas expanders expensive sas raid card
option 2: cheap chassis to serve "immediate" needs and go with more later. not sure what I'd use as a card? maybe even onboard?
regarding reliability: I once saw a database of failure rates of different models. raptor was the most reliable of the "desktop" drives. anyone have the link? I'm wondering of the seagate ES drives are worth the extra money vs the non-ES drives. they're supposedely more reliable and the "server versions" of sata drives.
