Favorite Website Hosting place?

[Viper_Fujax]

So I've gotten into some web development at work and made some applications and gotten decent (our company uses an application I made to ask for time out of the office).

I'm thinking of putting together a site for my gf for a place she can put her portfolio of artwork and what-not.

But I'm still pretty ignorant with how hosting websites work. It's different from my work where we have our own windows server and I put certain files there, and even that was a major pain in the ass (my boss had to do a lot of that for it to work)

The site would be made with a style called MVC using visual studio 2012, and i found this site that kind of explains how i could host an MVC application on godaddy

http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/6639/using-mvc3-applications-on-your-hosting

anyone have any advice? or if someones better than godaddy

[Viper_Fujax]

now that im thinking more..i dont know how i'd connect to a database too. i have sql server..but how would that connect to the website and how would my gf be able to add stuff to the database..hm

[Titan]

I actually use GoDaddy. I signed up for the account years ago when I registered my photography website. When I took over this site, I went against Bjorns advice to use Host Gator and continued to use GoDaddy (in retrospect, the takeover from Bjorn would have taken months less had I taken his advice, lol). I have to say, GoDaddy works. Can be confusing but its gotten a bit better since they revamped everything a couple months ago. Plus finding support online isn't hard. Their support is useless but Google support is good.

As for linking the database to the website, it isn't hard. When you sign up for the hosting, you can link it to a specific domain. But that hosting account is only linked to a specific domain (but there are options to get hosting to multiple domains). As for what they use, they have Windows and Linux servers and I use SQL through a Linux server. I think you can use SQLite and other variations.

What I like about GoDaddy's interface is you can organize the file system pretty well either using third party programs (which I could never figure out) or theirs (which is much easier for me). All the folders are neatly displayed and you can upload full folders without having to use an FTP client to do so. When I make mods here, it makes the process pretty easy. Just make sure you use Chrome with GoDaddy though. Their file browser hates Firefox.

The biggest problem I had with GoDaddy that I learned after the fact was that GoDaddy doesn't allow importing of large databases (which others like Host Gator do allow), which was a problem for me here. We had 14 years of posts and it was gigabytes of data for the database file. They only allow up to 1 gig; I found a work around. But if you aren't handling large SQL files, you shouldn't have a problem.

Basically, I'm satisfied. Their prices are good and they have domain extensions that others don't have yet (nabbed a .photography extension. They have a bunch your gf can use for her art). If I was gonna do it again, I'd probably use another hosting service but for someone who doesn't really know what they're doing, its fairly straight forward. Which is probably why they do very well with small business customers.

Hope this helps. Any other specific questions, let me know. I'll try to answer them the best I can for you

[Viper_Fujax]

awesome info. thanks man

ill let you know if i run into any questions when i start doing it. probably wont be for a few weeks

[SirMystiq]

What kind of site are you thinking of making. Heroku is pretty good to put up an application without having to worry about setting up the environment.

But it all depends on the scope of your application. I've built highly interactive Web Apps using Node. Js One using Extjs with a Java backend and Oracle.

MVC is the design of the Web app, not really relevant to hosting. Is Visual Studio the only tool you're willing to work with?

[Viper_Fujax]

What kind of site are you thinking of making. Heroku is pretty good to put up an application without having to worry about setting up the environment.

But it all depends on the scope of your application. I've built highly interactive Web Apps using Node. Js One using Extjs with a Java backend and Oracle.

MVC is the design of the Web app, not really relevant to hosting. Is Visual Studio the only tool you're willing to work with?

it's the one i'm most comfortable with since its the only environment i've worked in the last 3 years. It's going to be a pretty simple web page. Just links to different sections for different kinds of art, and lots of pictures

I only know basic html, jquery/javascript, and css. But its enough to do what i'm picturing for the site

[Titan]

So uh....yeah. Fuck GoDaddy, lol. I'm actually still in the process of moving our entire operations to a new host so the forum will work. I'll let you know how it works out if you are still working on your web development stuff. This host I'm moving the forums to is highly recommended.

[Evi]

I use HostGator or DreamHost. FatCow is okay too.