Website/Email hosts?

C

Captain Suave

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I have a small business with four employees. We are in need of a new host for our email. We've been using Arvixe for the last few months, but their reliability and support has been a steaming pile of shit. I'd consider Microsoft/Google hosting, but they're not particularly cost effective for the small feature set we'd regularly use.

Does anyone have strong recommendations?
 
Alkorin

Chancellor Alkorin

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If you want to run your own, and you're familiar with the toolsets, try Digital Ocean (Simple Cloud Infrastructure for Developers | DigitalOcean). $5/month gets you a Linux box that will run pretty much anything simple you'd want to run and you have full control over it. I run two VPS there and they have, to date, never been down for more than a couple of seconds over ~2 years except for patching or maintenance.

If you want traditional hosting where they do everything for you, MediaTemple is good, but I have no idea on their pricing.
 
S

Soriak_sl

shitlord
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I use BlueHost, which is pretty good and has some substantially discounted intro pricing for up to 3 years. Alas, my 3 years are coming up and I'm less thrilled about paying the full $110/year or so.

If you want to do everything yourself, going with Amazon might be a good idea. You can get a microserver free of charge and that should be enough to run a website for a small business. Maybe I should sit down and figure out how to do that this weekend...

I'm hosting two WordPress sites (via subdomains), some small files on another subdomain, and an SQL database and tool on yet another subdomain. Probably a little more complicated to set up again, but $110/year is a decent saving. Maybe I could pay someone $50 to do it for me.
 
Alkorin

Chancellor Alkorin

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Be careful with Amazon's micro server. It isn't free, it's partially free, and that's only for the first year. You won't pay for CPU, but you will pay for storage usage. For the default 8GB disk, that'll come out to about $4/month if I recall correctly. Not a big deal, but comparable to Digital Ocean and most other VPS services.

As someone who's used both, I prefer Digital Ocean by far. Amazon EC2 is way more capable from an API point of view, but the vast majority of small businesses wouldn't need any of that stuff.
 
Lanx

Lanx

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Woah, you guys can't go recommending aws amazon or digital river to someone whose coming from arvixe and used to using cpanel.

are you still looking for a cpanel managed solution? then yea bluehost and the ilk are fine.

are ok with linux commands and such and just loading up and installing a LAMP stack then sure digitalocean vps are great.

need more info
 
Porkchop

Porkchop

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Google apps is nice for the price.

Namecheap.com is a pretty sweet basic host. Unlimited email and storage for $30 for the first year and $130 per year after that. Solid service and good US based support.
 
C

Captain Suave

Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
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lanx_sl said:
Woah, you guys can't go recommending aws amazon or digital river to someone whose coming from arvixe and used to using cpanel.

are you still looking for a cpanel managed solution? then yea bluehost and the ilk are fine.

are ok with linux commands and such and just loading up and installing a LAMP stack then sure digitalocean vps are great.

need more info
Click to expand...
I *can* run my own email server, but I really don't want to. My time is much better spent on revenue-generating activity for the company. A turnkey solution is vastly preferable.

Thanks for the advice, all.
 
M

mixtilplix

Lord Nagafen Raider
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Google apps is the way to go if email is mission critical for your business. As the saying goes you get what you pay for. BTW, I work(ed) for a few those companies mentioned in the above replies and you know what all of them used for their internal email? Yup
smile.png
.
 
wamphyr

wamphyr

Molten Core Raider
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Well, in my book, free is always better. If you have a domain name already, go to Zoho.com for free e-mail, with the possibility to upgrade to a payed plan.
 
Lanx

Lanx

<Prior Amod>
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Just went and setup a simple digitalocean account vps (multiple domains) and added wordpress easily. went to use zoho for email, 10free accounts, even able to setup catchall. Took 1hr.
 
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