Finding a domain host
There’s so much cheap hosting around these days, it’s hard to know who’s good. One good tip is to look up the host’s name and “reviews” or “problems” in google and see what you can find. Many hosts have support forums and it’s worth looking at what problems are raised and whether (and how) they are dealt with by the host. If no problems are raised then look for signs of censorship because even the best host will have the occasional hiccup. The two I use are Micfo and Dreamhost and they’ve both been reasonably reliable, if I’ve needed to contact the staff, they’ve been friendly and they offer great deals. What I particularly like about both is they let you host as many domains as you want on one package. Micfo uses a cpanel interface to control your domains and let’s you set up a separate cpanel for each domain which is great if you are setting up domains/sites for other people because you can give them a login/password and then they’re in full control of their own site and you can keep access to your higher level web administration to yourself. The cpanel is a really easy to use interface that’s quite pretty. [screenshot] Micfo’s cpanel also gives you Fantastico which lets you do one click installs of a whole heap of popular web software like Wordpress, Drupal, bulletin boards, mailing lists etc. It’s heaps simple and definitely recommended if you are new to this and/or like pretty interfaces and/or are lazy. [screenshot] Dreamhost is not so pretty or as easy, also all your domains are managed from one centralised interface which is probably more convenient if all the domains are yours because it’s all in one place. Most of the cpanel options are in the Dreamhost interface and are probably actually simpler, it just seems harder because it just looks more hardcore. They also don’t have Fantastico which sucks but they’ve developed their own one-click installs for a few programs including WordPress. Anyway, installations are more reliable if you do them manually apparently. The other great thing about Dreamhost is they give you heaps and heaps of bandwidth and it increases by 16GB a week which is more than most places give you in a month. It’s employee owned and the people who own/work there all seem pretty nice. They have funny newsletters too. They are also quite happy to point out when they suck which is refreshing. This site’s being built on Dreamhost. Some other hosts that might be worth checking out are:
2cworth wrote:
Hi - which is the Micfo plan that allows multiple cpanels? Is it their shared hosting or the reseller plan?
Thanks
Posted 28 Oct 2006 at 8:22 am ¶
catherine wrote:
I think their reseller plan has a limit on accounts you can create, it’s not clear from their list of features but it says so in the FAQs.
I’ve just used the shared hosting plans and never found any limits, I started on MG Super and then upgraded to MG Special and am able to make separate accounts (with their own cpanels) without any limits (other than you have to preallocate space/bandwidth) that I can notice. I’ve currently got 17 sites each with their own cpanel through the account. Mind you, I did have to ask them to set it up when I first got the MG Super account so I could create packages, they did very quickly though and it’s worked smoothly ever since.
How it works with mine, is that on my first domain domain.com, they create a “web host manager” or a whm that’s accessible through domain.com/whm and from there you create “packages” and then create new accounts allocated to the “package”, each account has its own cpanel.
If you are thinking of getting one, I’d email their sales and get confirmation that you can have unlimited accounts for your hosting package. Things do change and I always like getting a written guarantee.
Posted 28 Oct 2006 at 5:14 pm ¶