Registration and hosting services

[E Frank Ball]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 07:14:05PM -0800, Andrew wrote:
} A friend of mine wants to set up a small website for his
} home-based business and needs registration and hosting services.
} I looked through last January's thread on this list about
} registrars and saw that gandi.net, domainsdoneright.com,
} domaindiscover.com, and mydomain.com all received nods from
} various people, with gandi.net's being the most enthusiastic. Has
} anybody's opinion changed since then?
} 
} Does anybody have any suggestions for hosting services? (The site
} will be small, static, and fairly low-traffic.)

I have been using mydomain.com for three years now.  They have been
having periodic problems with their mail servers.  DNS has been pretty
reliable.  They were down one day when they had a big DOS attack (yes
they have multiple DNS servers, but one was offline, two got DNSed and
the last one was overloaded), but otherwise it's been fine (that's 99.9%
uptime, hard to fault for free - far better than granitecanyon.com's DNS
service).

I've run my own mailserver for the last two years (I have about 99.6%
uptime, which has been much more reliable than mydomain.com's mail
service), and I've always had my own webserver, so all I need is DNS
service which has been fine.  I do not recommend them if you need email
forwarding.

As for cheap service:  The cheapest hosting is to do it yourself.  I
have my mighty 66MHz 486 with 32MB of RAM running as my mail/web/ssh/ntp
server.  It's been fun seeing just what I can do with it, but with
spamassassin and some experiments with CGI I'm finding it's limits.
I have a 1.5M/256k ADSL from sonic.net with a static IP.

My webserver is thttpd (from www.acme.com) compilied without CGI
support.  dhttpd and webfs are a couple of others I've used in the past
(you can find them on freshmeat.net).  Running without CGI support in a
chroot jail is easy and secure.  thttpd is less than 1/10 the size of
apache and 10x as fast, the others are quite a bit smaller.  The config
files are about 4 lines long.  Virtual hosting is easy too.

If you don't want to host yourself I used www.your-site.com for a couple
years for one non-profit I did the web page for.  $5/month for hosting +
$25/year for a domain name is $85/year including "multi-homing" (virtual
hosting).  They were reliable and they do mail forwarding or pop
mailboxes and mailing lists.  Their servers are Sun machines, and they
have ssh2 running, but they don't advertise it.

-- 

   E Frank Ball                frankb at efball.com