Another web hosting thread

[definitive]

Would a shared hosting plan from someone like GoDaddy, BlueHost or HostGator be adequate for site that would be used for a store? Or would I need something like RackSpace hosting plan that can go to around $200/month?

The site will be mostly for information purposes for a physical place which is a store. It will have about page, another info page, contact form, location info, and a newsletter. There's also one feature that the store will have (which I made a separate thread for) where it would stream video from the store (ex: people walking by the store).

 

[CANEHDN]

As long as the hosted server is PCI compliant. You can get huge fees from Visa and Mastercard if you store credit card numbers and you're not PCI compliant. I went with SingleHop which is a dedicated server solution. They've been awesome. If I ever have any PCI issues they fix them right away.

If you don't need to be PCI compliant, then you probably won't need a dedicated solution, at the start.

 

[dmmcintyre3]

Will people be entering credit card details directly on your site or on a external payment processor's site? If the second one, shared hosting will work.

 

[notjustjay]

I think we need to back up here so we don't make incorrect assumptions.

When you say "the web site is for a store" do you mean only that it's just a web site that talks about your physical store? Or is the website itself an actual online store, like Amazon, with a shopping cart and checkout and pay online by credit card?

Those are two completely different things. Although, either way, unless you're a huge store, the hosting plans you describe should be OK. Even the streaming webcam is probably not a big deal in terms of bandwidth.

 

[manueld]

As long as you don't need SSL for payments and such, shared hosting is fine.

 

[definitive]

they won't be selling anything online, only in the actual store itself (physical). only thing that the site will be is information about the store, newsletters, and maybe coupons for the store. i was looking at some of their competition online, and most of them used expensive hosting, even though their sites also contained plain information, so i was wondering why they didn't simply go with the more common share hosting companies. it's not like there's a lot of info to host on there (maybe 5-10megs of text/images total). it doesn't make sense to have to pay a hundred dollars a month when you can pay ten or less for same quality service (from reviews i've read, and personal experience, the cheaper shared hosting sites have very little down time, and don't usually choke up when serving basic info).

 

[notjustjay]

Sounds like you should be fine then.

There are gazillions of web hosts out there, and as long as you stick with a well known one (the ones you listed seem to be popular names) you should be fine. The risk of downtime may be a little bit higher but for a website representing a single physical store, I bet most people wouldn't even notice or care.