Here in Seattle a lot of us use drizzle.com The company has been in business here for at least ten years, is small enough that the customer service is exceptional, the price is right and there seems to be very little staff turn over. I called to get extra memory capacity added to our web site just last week and dealt with the same rep who set up our account in 1998.

I've never had any problem with either the email service or web hosting and I recommend them highly.

Jack

I'll second Yahoo, I recently switched to them and haven't regretted the move.

Thanks guys. I didn't even know Yahoo did web hosting, and the specs for the Yahoo standard account are way higher than what I get now for the same price. Not sure if the video download speed will be good enough though. I'll try downloading stuff from the sites they host and do some tracerouting and pinging etc..

Hmmm... Yahoo web hosting.... no way to ask a question by email and the phone number doesn't work from Thailand. Big black mark :-(

Yahoo! is also considered one of the largest sewers of spammers and spammer hosting. You'll find that they are blacklisted and blocked by quite a few networks around the world. While this doesn't matter much for casual home users, it can sometimes cause problems for a business. If you send email from your Yahoo! account or from forms on the website, you'll often find various areas that won't be able to receive it. You'll also find various anti-spam fanatics who will refuse to visit your site or buy anything from you because, by hosting with Yahoo! you are supporting them and in turn supporting the spammers who are hosted there.

True, these paricular anti-spammers are probably only a tiny portion of the internet (heck, i'm a rampant anti-spammer and i don't block anything Yahoo!), so it probably won't affect you much. Just don't be surprised when you find out that a few folks aren't able to or won't visit your site.

I tried a few different hosts and had some bad downtime experiences. But for the past two years I have been with these guys:

http://www.myacen.com/

Never had my site down in 2 years :-) Very good tech support for questions, extra features etc

Without a doubt the best value is StartLogic. Plenty of space, more than enough traffic allowance and easy to reach tech support! Give 'em a try.

Jay

Cheers everyone. Thanks Kelly for the words of warning about Yahoo.

Anyone got any experiences with Verio or Pipex? Plus I'd love to hear from any of you guys who have large video files online if you're happy with the download speed.

I have a possibly OT question about this subject....I was going to recommend the host I use, which is bluedomino.com (also owners of CoffeeCup software). While I've had an account and domain there for a year or more, I've just now started to get some web stuff online. What I've mostly used them for is offline storage and email forwarding. They have never gone down to my knowledge.

My question is, how can I test the bandwidth of my site when it goes live (hopefully in the next week or two) ?

You need to exmaine the statistics of your website once it's up. Ask them what the options are, for example supplying you with raw statistics logs or stats software that you run online.

I manage 2 sites. On my own site I download the raw statistic logs and process them with Awstats which is a Perl program. On the other site the host has Urchin software online for viewing the stats.

Did you look into StartLogic? Great for video files!

Jay

I use Godaddy.com. Prices are comparable to others, good customer service and limited downtime. 2GB storage, 100GB monthly band usage allowed for $9.95.

The videos on my site average about 15 megabits in length WMV format. I have only had one or two users send negative comments on being able to access. Both had dial up and the problem was really with their service not with my provider.

I third yahoo. Blocking should not be an issue, as your domain name will not be yahoo, it will be your domain so it should not be blacklisted.

I've tried several others, and so far they are the best. I host my video there and it works fine.

I have serveral sites with them now. Heck, they even backup your site, which most ISP do not do.

For those looking at hosting go over to forums.anandtech.com and click on the hot deals forum. Theres a couple of recent posts about hosting, just search for them

I've been using RED CHECK HOSTING and have never had any probs or complaints on the vids I stream. Cheap too. You can check some of my vids and see how they run for you:

Mah Videos

Good luck !

- Mutt

www.undergroundplanet.com