Almost got my decision made...

Looking for a host that will support Miva and allow me to keep my mail MX record seperate as I'm giving web based email to my users.

If possible would like one that does not have a setup fee. It takes me about 5 minutes to setup an account so i don't see a reason to charge for it.

Originally posted by MilkMan:
Miva

I know veoweb.net Supports this (althought I dont use it) I see in in my control panel..also they are having an august special that has no set up fee ..I bought the august special for 2 of my domains and its been working well.

Milkman,

How familiar are you with Miva Merchant? If you are, could you e-mail me, vladislav@davidzon.com please? I am very curious as to their product, and really want to talk to a user who actually has used their software in the past and knows it well, as I am seriously in the middle of choosing between Miva and an open-source solution as main-stream for our users. What I am very curious about is to find out where Miva lacks, or how it is better than open-source products.

Thanks, I really appreciate your help and any assistance you can give us! :-)

Sincerely,


Vladislav Davidzon <davidzon@thinkhost.com> :-)
Senior Network Administrator - ThinkHost Web Hosting Services
http://www.thinkhost.com - honesty, reliability, trust.
We are the smart choice for all your web hosting needs! (TM)

Originally posted by MilkMan:
Almost got my decision made...

Looking for a host that will support Miva and allow me to keep my mail MX record seperate as I'm giving web based email to my users.

If possible would like one that does not have a setup fee. It takes me about 5 minutes to setup an account so i don't see a reason to charge for it.



Hmm. When you say "supports Miva" do you mean has the ability to install/setup Miva Merchant or that actually has Merchant installed? There is a difference (for instance, just about everybody has Miva Empresa installed, which is what Merchant requires, but may not have Merchant installed).

I know ValueWeb offers Merchant as part of some of their plans, as someone just moved to us from them and mentioned it to us. (He also mentioned that scripting for it was a royal pain.) I'm not sure how they would handle changing MX records to point to, say, eveyone.net.


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Annette
Hosting Matters, Inc.
http://www.hostmatters.com

As for Miva, there's more to it than the merchant ability.

I've got a site on a server for but they lack cgi-bin access. I've gottten quite handy at writing Miva scripts for form mails and messageboards and don't wanna throw away all that work when setting up a new site.

I've got the merchant part setup but don't have anything to sell, so I can't give a review of it.

"More than Merchant" - I know, but most people when they say Miva really mean Merchant. Didn't want to make any presumptions about which you had in mind :)

In that case, I know any Alabanza-based host can support both the Miva (HTMLScript) and MX changes (if they are inclined to do them). I'm sure there are other providers who do the same, I'm just more familiar with Alabanza, for obvious reasons.

However, any provider who offers Merchant as part of thei package will be able to support Miva script, as Miva Empresa (the part that provides support for scripting) is a required element of Merchant. The only other issue would be changing the MX records for you, and possibly adding a mime type to handle any .mv scripts.

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Annette
Hosting Matters, Inc.
http://www.hostmatters.com

Check out www.pair.com (http://www.pair.com) -- they provide Miva. If you want reliability, they're the ones to go with. Definitely a winner host.

The folks over at http://www.olm.net/ support it to. And they have excellent support.