Hi all,

I posted this message looking for a host with the following features about a month ago, but as someone pointed out, my email was turned off in my profile making it difficult to reply (I understand web hosts can't reply to this forum with their responses). So now my email is turned on, here goes with my needs:

- Linux only (NO Windows/NT)
- No setup fee
- <= $20/mo. (no annual fees or other "hidden" fees)
- 200+ MB disk space (NO UNLIMITED SPACE ACCOUNTS!)
- 5+ GB data transfer (NO UNLIMITED TRANSFER ACCOUNTS!)
- Static IP address
- PGP program installed (true PGP - not GPG)
- SENDMAIL program installed
- Perl 5.x
- CGI-BIN directory
- Allowed to use host's shared SSL certificate
- 10+ POP email accounts
- 10+ autoresponders
- 25+ email aliases with "catch-all" forwarding
- 3+ FTP accounts
- 3+ subdomains
- Anonymous FTP
- Online control panel
- Support for SSI
- Daily online statistics (not just access to the log files)
- 30 day money-back guarantee
- Billable monthly
- E-mail support is fine (or online forum), but response time should be less than 4 hours.
- Server should be hosted in a reasonably decent NOC, not in someone's garage <g>.
- I will maintain my own DNS servers; host should not require switching domain over to their DNS servers.


Not absolutely required but would be nice:
- Should not be against host's policy to put additional web sites in subdirs of this account (assuming I use my own DNS to redirect other domains to those subdirectories).

I'd like to receive email from both webhosts with qualified plans or from customers who have been with happy with their host who offers these features.

The deal-breaker for most of the hosts I've reviewed appears to be the requirement for PGP. As I take orders via my site, I MUST have PGP installed to run my business. Some hosts are offering GPG (GnuPGP), but I don't want to re-engineer my shopping cart since it already works well with regular PGP and from what I can tell these two programs have different command line interfaces.

Thanks in advance...

Vinnie Murdico
Software with Brains, Inc.
http://www.softwarewithbrains.com

Check Futurequest.net they are great I have few sites with them. I am not sure if they offer your own DNS!! for that you need a dedicated server or a Raq

Thanks! I'll check them out. Actually, I don't need my own DNS server through the new host, I simply meant that I already have DNS services for my domains through a third-party DNS provider. A couple of hosts I spoke with said I was required to use their DNS server for my domain, which I don't want to do. I just need the web space and an IP. I'd prefer to take care of the DNS myself.

-Vinnie Murdico

Just out of curiousity: who is your third-party DNS provider?

Andy

Check out http://www.virtualis.com, they can handle what you need.

Originally posted by IPC PRO
Check out http://www.virtualis.com, they can handle what you need.
As far as I know, Virtualis doesn't support PGP.

I hosted with Virtualis and left after a month. There are better hosts to choose from.

AndyB - I'm currently using easyDNS (www.easydns.com) for my softwarewithbrains.com site. I've been really happy with them for the past couple of years. They're not cheap, but for my main business site I wanted to make sure I used somebody reliable and they have been VERY reliable and responsive.

For my other two "little" sites <g>, I just use mydomain.com and I must say, I've actually been surprised how good the service has been -- rarely ever a connection problem. However, their support seems a bit on the unresponsive side. But, believe me, for free I'm not complaining! <g>

I'm actually also looking for a registrar who offers DNS/redirection along with the registration service. I saw namecheap.com now has redirection, but there was some talk over whether they were actually ICANN accredited or not. But that's another thread... <g>

- Vinnie Murdico

Thanks for the scoop, lucas. It's good to hear from someone with personal experience. Is your softwarewithbrains.com DNS entry (or either of your other sites) a forward to a URL? I've been interested in how well that actually works.

Andy

AndyB,

For my softwarewithbrains.com entry, it's a regular DNS address record pointing directly to an IP. I also have the ability to set up subdomains that can point to any URLs within my site (or anywhere for that matter). For example, I have
http://support.softwarewithbrains.com pointing to the support page on my site (under the same IP as the main .com address). There are also email forwardning features and other stuff, but to be quite honest, I think mydomain.com has almost all the same features for free. I just figured it would be a bit wiser to "pay" for DNS for my main business site since my income depends on it!

For my smaller sites, they use mydomain.com. One of them (http://www.bdesupport.com) utilizes mydomain's "IP pointing" just like the easyDNS setup for my softwarewithbrains site since I have a different static IP for bdesupport.com (it has it's own individual hosting account). However, since the bdesupport.com account is only using a wee small portion of its drive space and traffic allowance, I also host my brother's personal web site within a subdirectory of that account. I have his domain's DNS under mydomain.com as well, but his domain uses their "redirection" service since it can't point directly to the IP address which would take people to bdesupport.com's index page. So his account uses their "Stealth" redirection or "Cloaking" which essentially uses HTML frames to keep his domain in the address bar while the browser views a page under my site's IP. Kinda sleazy and there are other problems with it (like with search engines), but for free hosting, he can't complain either! And for a non-critical personal site, it works pretty well. This way, if I need to move my site and can't host him, he can just throw his site up on a free web page and change the redirection to point to the new host -- all done! My goal is to eventually get a regular IP site for him as well though. For that I need to find one of those $25/year accounts (but I still want him to have an IP address <g>). But, alas, that too is another thread... <g>

-- Vinnie Murdico

Very cool, lucas. Thanks for taking the time to share all of that, it was definitely valuable. The "stealth" redirection stuff was pretty foggy to me - now it makes perfect sense. Thanks again.

Andy