Hosting Wanted!

I'm looking for very reliable hosting for one of my sites.

It needs about 1gb web space, 5gb data transfer, SSL certificate, good tech support.

At certain times in the year traffic could be anything between 500 - 1000 visitors a day but generally would expect around 100 a day.

T0PS has already suggested clara dot net as a reliable option but thought I'd get everyone elses views on this subject as well.

 

UK, US or worlwide hosting?

 

UK ideally.

The whole World will use the site but it's mostly UK.

 

If its mostly UK, then go for UK hosting, it ranks better in MSN.co.uk and Google.co.uk

Still ranks well in the .coms too.

 

Wier,

I recommend Site5 to pretty much everyone. Great customer service and loads of options. Check it out www.site5.com

 

Having your site hosted in the UK effects the rankings for the pages? I never knew that

 

Wow, that's great value for money. Does it have an SSL certificate installed already because I really dont want to have to install one again?

It does seem to be in the US though which goes against what Design Agent just said.

 

My hosting my signature below is just awsome. It is US, but I really don't know how critical that is. Anyways, it is only 90$ US for a year...this includes domain name and hosting. They also have SSL's installed, it just costs a bit more to use it.

 

Im *up to* 99% sure.

I have
1. UK registered, UK hosting - does well .co.uks (+ .coms) (.com domain)
2. UK registered, UK hosting - does well .co.uks (+ .coms) (.co.uk domain)
3. UK registered, US hosting - does ok on .co.uks (.co.uk domain)
4. UK registered, US hosting - does not do well .co.uks (.com)
5. US registered, US hosting - does well .com

So, my guess would be: UK registration + UK hosting to rank well in UK search engines (add 'UK' to the page content too).

 

And which hosting company would you recommend?

 

Yes, physical location of the site is part of the ranking algo. At least, last time I checked (not been much up to spec with SEO lately).

If you want 1GB storage, Clara won't be a good option. Try Flump.

 

I'd ditto that. I've recently moved all my stuff to their multisite plan. Its top bollocks as far as I'm concerned. I have about 20 domains each with its own bandwidth, size allocations etc. Their Multiadmin is a bit flaky, but tech support is generally fast and helpful.

As for SSL - I think that doesn't come, but I'm sure they'd help you set it up as they are always willing to help with such things.

 

Flump looks pretty good actually. There's a possibility my client may want to store 10,000 products on his site which is a huge amount of memory when you add up those images.

 

My largest shop has about 500 products and that takes up about 100 meg hard disk space and 5 meg database space. Because of the damn Google image bot it eats 5gb a month but I banned that sucker now so should drop to 2-3gb bandwidth.

That might help you reference your needs.

 

We have around 250 currently but it is expanding every week and there are plans to increase this even more.

Those figures would tie in fairly closely with mine. How do you ban the image bot? That's got to kill the bandwidth!! Can you not just set the write permissions of the image folder to stop the image bot?

 

have you tried sonnet hosting, never used them but have been recommended them in the past

 

I use www.asmallorange.com and paid the extra $5 to get reseller status. That gives you not only the standard cPanel but WHM access. Its great if you have a lot of sites, they can all be administered from one panel.

As far as server location, it is negligible if you use the country .tld however becomes much more important if you are a .com

 

I use a few different hosts..

Freeola - if you want to use their internet access - you end up with very cheap hosting.
Compila - Good so far + they answer the phones.
Hostgator - not bad so far (US).

 

Block Image Bot either the hard way in htaccess or in robots.txt:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

 

Thats the kind of package I have right now but every 4 months they update their servers and down goes everyones sites for a week. It's not an expensive host provider but it ends up being expensive for my client who is selling products every day.

Are you sure about the server location? This would be a good for one of mcdars crazy projects