web hosting: can anyone recommend a good company?

[scampadoodle]

I want to have a few sites: one to showcase my design business, one potentially for shopping & a couple more portfolio-type sites.

I don't need site-building as I'm making them myself in DreamWeaver, and obviously I can design them.

I'd prefer a British-based company, and one that's not too expensive. Oh, and idiot-proof because I am not techie-minded at all.

TIA!

1&1 is fairly good, I haven't used them myself but friends have and have rated them highly.

Given there will be 4 web sites, I would suggest checking Hostroute, which has UK servers and their cheapest 'reseller' account at 9 pounds/month (90/year) is aimed at someone hosting up to 5 sites (so you have flexibility for 1 more of your own, or for a client if you wanted).

The control panels are WHM (Web Host Manager, allowing you to create the 'customer' accounts, one per domain - each account can have 500 MB storage and up to 20 GB of web traffic per month - if you exceed that you'd need to consider alternative hosting firms) and for the individual accounts, cPanel (which is widely used and one of the most 'complete' I have seen).

There are video tutorials to 'get you started' (showing a few essentials like setting up e-mail and so on). Their service offers PHP (v5.2.13), Perl, MySQL (v4.1.22-standard) with up to 5 databases.

You nominate one domain as the 'reseller' account and if you login to cPanel with that account, can switch to control most features of the other accounts too (eg mail forwarding / POP mailboxes, etc). Some features would need you to login with the correct account for the domain (eg to control MySQL databases).

Hello Tia,

I am using www.webhost.uk.net its 3 years now , I will say they are just fantastic.Best is they are UK LTD company and for someone like us looking for good support and low cost they are just perfect

Thanks for your replies. NetworkGuy: yours looks very informative & thorough but I have to confess I understood about 10% of it!

I'll check out all your recommendations.

Thanks again

I used United Hosting for five years. Their instructions were easy to follow and their service reliable.

Their services start at £5 per month.

Sorry, OP, did not mean to confuse - but if you have 4 different sites to put online, hosting costs to cover multiple sites will probably work out cheapest for you.

The cPanel menu can be seen in demo - I found the link on an Ebay listing. One of the first few icons you see will be the Getting Started wizard which explains some aspects of web hosting.

Unfortunately, when you go into web site hosting, you may feel 'dropped in at the deep end' when you see dozens of icons, but you will need to do a few things for sure:

1. be able to upload files (web pages, and graphic images) whether via the 'file manager' (on cPanel/whatever) or using some FTP software

and
2) set up e-mail, perhaps to forward messages to 'sales' and 'info' to your current mailbox.

Those are the essentials. Web stats will show you information about visitors to your site, and the rest of the options are less important when you get started.

Whatever hosting you end up with, you are likely to see quite a lot of technical features which you do not need to worry about (and may never use at all). So prepare yourself for some reading / searching and do not be scared to ask if you get stuck - some questions might need to go to the hosting firm, others might get a gentle response here in MN !