Business Website Hosting -- opinions?

[Majromax]

This is completely off-topic, but I like the RB community so I thought I'd ask here.

My girlfriend's just starting a online hobby/semi-business; she makes wooden (decorative) hairsticks. She's gotten private orders in the past week, and would pretty soon like to set up a real, bona-fide storefront website. Since her birthday's also (coincidentally) coming up in about a week and a half, I'd like to get her set up as much as I can and surprise her.

I have enough experience with programming/websites that I can probably handle the technical end of the storefront just fine (or learn realquicklike if I don't know it already), but since I haven't done this before I don't know too much about the gamut of hosting sites.

I don't need too much in the way of bells and whistles from a hosting service; storage requirements and bandwidth transfer will likely be pretty minimal (<50MB storage, probably <500MB/mo). Enough scripting-allowed to set up a shopping cart of some sort is highly desired (likely meaning Perl, PHP, with limited database access); an already-setup shopping cart would be a nice plus, but isn't necessary.

Paypal will probably be used for credit card verification for the short/medium term, so I'm not too worried about the storefront itself -- Paypal itself has limited services of the sort, including its own https servers for the credit card entry. It'd be nice to have a real, custom shopping cart either soon or medium-term, though, which would require eventual https services.

Has anyone here done something of this sort before? Any recommendiations either as to which hosting service to use, or something more specific to look for?

[Zed-F]

I can't help much other than to say I have heard some not so good things about Paypal in the past. Unfortunately I wasn't really paying attention to the details so I can't be specific, but I have heard more bad than good about them.

[Majromax]

I can't help much other than to say I have heard some not so good things about Paypal in the past. Unfortunately I wasn't really paying attention to the details so I can't be specific, but I have heard more bad than good about them.

The not-good things I've heard about Paypal are mostly of incredibly overzealous 'fraud' enforcement policies -- of the "freeze the account first, ask questions later" sort. There's comfort here in that my girlfriend's budding business is in the process of dealing with physical goods (so that proof could be given in the form of a shipping receipt), and we'll move the attached bank account to a dedicated business bank account shortly.

Also, we're in Canada at the moment, so the arm of Paypal's enforcement reach is limited to the balance in the account at any given moment (precisely $0, usually) and whatever they can try through Offical Channels with respect to the bank transfers (deposits).

Aside from that, Paypal offers the least-hassle, most convenient way of accepting credit card payments that I've seen, for a low-volume hobby. If/when that changes, then moving to a real processor would be good (also to get slightly lower fees) -- but no need to change everything at once.

[Green_Gloom]

1&1 or Parcom may have what you're looking for.

I haven't used either myself, but I have heard good things about them elsewhere.

[Majromax]

Thanks; in the meantime (since posting this thread originally) I went with a company based out of Vancouver. If this doesn't work out, I'll take a good look. References are always a good thing (and often hard to get, if you don't know anyone else doing the same thing), since there are so bloody many hosting companies out there.

[FoxBat]

The not-good things I've heard about Paypal are mostly of incredibly overzealous 'fraud' enforcement policies -- of the "freeze the account first, ask questions later" sort. There's comfort here in that my girlfriend's budding business is in the process of dealing with physical goods (so that proof could be given in the form of a shipping receipt), and we'll move the attached bank account to a dedicated business bank account shortly.

This may have been a response to a class-action lawsuit filed against them a while back due to an egregious number of accounts being "hacked". My debit card number was stolen this way and I was fortunate to recoup most of the losses (although this was as a personal account, not a small business.)

[Occhidiangela]

1&1 or Parcom may have what you're looking for.

I haven't used either myself, but I have heard good things about them elsewhere.

A good friend went with Servint's Essential VPS plan for his website. You may or may not want to use that plan. He's using Mambo to manage content.

EDIT: Suggest going here to get a sense of how 1&1 is seen by some customers and hosters.



Occhi