Hi, all. I am still trying to determine which hosting service to use on my real shoe string budget and I came across this site. It lists the top 10 web hosting sites along with features and pricing. I would like to get some feed back from our seasoned VAs about some of these sites. I know this particular question has probably been beaten many times on these forums, but will you endulge us newbies one more time with your feedback?

http://www.top10hostinglist.com/?gcl...FULsKgodwzL_rg

Wendy

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http://www.anofcextension.com
Office support, Database Creation and Management, Internet Research

Personally, I use hostgator. Love their customer service and how quickly they respond to questions. I don't usually like chat features, but their is great; very quick to respond. Someone, just recently, told me that they changed over to FatCow and love it as well.

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Janet
JG Assistance

I'm using iPage (which is the same company as FatCow). My basic Wordpress pages sometimes take > 20 seconds to load. Suffice it to say that I will be abandoning ship for hostgator as soon as I can transfer the 'free' domain iPage gave me.

-1 for iPage.

I am using FatCow and have been impressed with their customer service and response times to my questions. I have not yet completed my website but will watch carefully to see how quickly the pages load. Hopefully it will not be an issue.

I do love that they are powered by 100% wind energy; it's a small way that I can be green while running my business.

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Linda
Clockwise Virtual Assistance

Although it is not on the top ten hosting list, I love my domain host: www.dot5hosting.com. It *was* on this list when I got my account, though.

I only had one problem when I started using dot5, which was really a user issue, not a hosting issue (can't remember what it was now, though!), and they helped me through it in about 5 minutes.

The online interface is super easy to use, and they have a lot of different add-ons that are free to use. They use SimpleScripts, and it includes more than one option for all of the following areas: blogs, content management, client management, ecommerce, forms and surveys, forums guest books, help center, live chat, mailing lists, photo galleries, project management, RSS, utilities, website builders and wiki. It also has a few other areas with one option each. (There are quite a few new things here, which I am eager to try out!)

And when I logged on today to check the list for Simple Scripts, it gave me a discount code to share! If you sign up today, you get a nice discount. Use the code 'MAY295' at www.dot5hosting.com/secret -- it's a referral discount, so you'll have to mention my username (adminprofi) to get it, it seems. (I'm definitely not trying to pressure you, it just happened to pop up as a possibility, and the price is so darned good, I had to share.)

Margretta

Thanks, everyone. I have my name registered at namecheap, but after reading the article on the 5 things to do when getting a domain, I discovered something about making sure that I actually own the domain. Can anyone tell me how to do that? It may have been mentioned somewhere in the posts already, but I either missed or don't understand how to do check.
Wendy

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http://www.anofcextension.com
Office support, Database Creation and Management, Internet Research

If you registered it yourself (didn't have someone else register it for you, for instance), then it's yours. After 60 days you can log in to the registrar (namecheap, in your case) and opt to move it to a different registrar if you ever need to. For me, I registered one with iPage, so they are the registrar, but I am the owner. 60 days after my registration, I can move it from iPage to GoDaddy (where my others are). The 60 day thing is a limit to keep you from hopping around too much.

It's like owning a home...no one really ever owns it in the truest sense. But, as long as you keep paying your yearly domain renewal, you have control of your domain name.

Does that make sense (it's early here)?

If you are not sure that you are the register owner of the domain go to whois.net and check out the registration information. Since you registered yourself, your information should be there.

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Lee Drozak
My Office Assistant

Thanks for the input everyone. I went to whois.net and it showing and this is what I found. Can you savvy seasoned VAs help? Should I turn WHOIS off? WHOIS information for anofcextension.com :
[Querying whois.verisign-grs.com]
[Redirected to whois.enom.com]
[Querying whois.enom.com]
[whois.enom.com]
=-=-=-=
Visit AboutUs.org for more information about anofcextension.com


Registration Service Provided By: Namecheap.com
Contact: support@namecheap.com
Visit: http://namecheap.com

Domain name: anofcextension.com

Registrant Contact:
WhoisGuard
WhoisGuard Protected ()

Fax:
11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200
Los Angeles, CA 90064
US

Administrative Contact:
WhoisGuard
WhoisGuard Protected (589d53f46a804a82926b5ef308fdf 42c.protect@whoisguard.com)
+1.6613102107
Fax: +1.6613102107
11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200
Los Angeles, CA 90064
US

Technical Contact:
WhoisGuard
WhoisGuard Protected (589d53f46a804a82926b5ef308fdf 42c.protect@whoisguard.com)
+1.6613102107
Fax: +1.6613102107
11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200
Los Angeles, CA 90064
US

__________________
http://www.anofcextension.com
Office support, Database Creation and Management, Internet Research

IVAA offers free hosting with membership, I was planning on using them. Seems like a good way to save money, any input?