I'm developing a site for a small company. The site doesn't have any server side scripting. I would like to know what to look for when selecting a Host and any suggestions of Company's you guys have used.

P.S. Which ever company I use to host the site, they need to have the capability of online ordering so I don't need to change the Web Hosting Company in the future.

Thanx.

Zoom

Im not sure if I understand where your going with this post. If you could provide a bit more detail I would be happy to help :-)

I'm also not sure specifically what you mean when you say the host must provide online ordering capabilities. If you mean that the host must offer a shopping cart system, there are many that do that. A search for e-commerce hosting will bring those hosts to the top of your search results.

Some of these hosts can guide you as you establish a merchant account or provide you with more information on the "no merchant account needed" payment processing services like Revecom.com or Instabill.com. (Those services have recently been discussed on this forum if you're interested in learning more about those.)

If you want to use a third-party shopping cart system that will not tie you in to any particular host, I recommend Americart.com. For $249/year, they provide a terrific, no-programming-needed shopping cart with lots of options.

As for what to look for in a host, Annette already mentioned Deb's terrific article. Here's another article that mentions the factors you should consider when choosing a host: http://www.thefreecountry.com/articles/findhost.html

Good luck.

josut thought id say its http://freevsd.org :)

Generally, you should decide what kind of capabilities/objectives are to be met by the site.

Following that, you should then decide
1. Based on the above, is there any scripts that currently meet the needs/objectives
2. Does it cost?
3. What is it written on.

and so on

From there, you can formulate a list of what you really need, and look for hosts that satisfy them

A shopping cart can go as cheap as 0 for something like Oscommerce and it is fairly powerful and customisable (not that easy on UI side)

If you always use a 3rd party clearning like Paysystems or 2checkout, you don't have to worry either about your site moving as all the data is stored with them, and not locally on your website.

Hope this helps.

check the thread date for this one guys ;) I was wondering why Carol has posted as I haven't seen her around here in years.

If the thread starter hasn't found hosting by now I think they're in a bit of trouble :D

Greg Moore