Thinking of starting an electonics goods website. Can anyone recommend a good host? I was also thinking of going with Yahoo webhosting services. Would this be a bad idea? Thanks in advance.

I could not recommend Yahoo in this case.

What you want is a host that will help you via fast response to tickets, gives you plenty of room to grow, and has Fantastico for easy script installation. Before becoming a host myself, I had experience with GoDaddy, Hostmonster, Earthlink, 1&1, Hostica, and RackHost. Of these, I'd only recommend RackHost (http://www.rackhost.net/).

For $5.95/mo they provide quality support and do not oversell. You'll need a dedicated IP and SSL certificate, with which they can also help.

Since you posted in the e-commerce forum, I'm assuming you want to sell those electronics from your site, and that what attracted you to Yahoo was their online store hosting.

I think you can do better with a host chosen for its, well, hosting qualities, and install your own cart software. On this very forum, you'll see discussions of some of the free and paid possibilities.

Let us know on this thread if you have more questions.

Oh yes, I definitely want to sell products from the site. Is it necessary to have a dedicated ip for this? So many hosts to choose from. I've thought about choosing one and installing my own shopping cart software. What made me think of Yahoo hosting was that it would probably be easier to be included in their search engine and easier, or so I thought. If I do go with another web host what are some others ways to market your site besides showing up on the first page of a search on say google or yahoo.

You'll want your own IP and SSL so you can securely take credit card information from customers. Yes, you can install your own shopping cart. If you have cPanel with Fantastico, for instance, you have a few free choices that will install with a click or two, including oscommerce, zencart, and cubecart, I think. There are other options, too, if you don't like those.

I don't know whether Yahoo stores include any kind of preferred indexing for the search engine, but you can do this on your own, too. What's going to be unique about your store? Is it a particular niche in electronics? Particular brands, prices, location, whatever? Include lots of good text that describes all this in your site, with each page devoted to a specific product, and the search engines will find those pages nice and tasty.

Then, for marketing, think of where your buyers hang out. They might be online, perhaps in electronics forums, where you should become a regular poster, offering help just like people do here in WHT for hosting, and this will produce two good results: the search engines will like you even more when there are links to your site from busy forums, and people who use those forums and search engines will visit your site as well.

There's more to marketing than the above, but it's a good start. Good luck in choosing a host and in launching your site.

There will be lot options for you, but you need to have at least following feature on your hosting package.

dedicated IP with SSL to secure transaction
good uptime on server and network
secure env if you are on shared
shopping cart feature or some ecommerce script
.... as i think.. :)

good luck with shopping your hosting package for your business.

Ocanyc,

We specialize in ecommerce. Our web site is: http://www.ecommercedev.com. We have set up numberous amounts of ecommerce web sites using software application such as oscommerce, creloaded and even volusion (not setup, but configured the store). We setup the store for free once a web hosting plan has been purchased. Like iHubNet stated, you will need a SSL, this we also provide from GeoTrust.com but at a discounted price.

Email us for more information or view our oscommerce section on our web ste.

Thanks.

Check out http://www.byethost.com too. You may find a link to paid hosting on the main page. You can get a free domain.