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Hosting Companies
Dmoz.org's
list of web hosting
companies,
UK.
Yahoo's web
site hosting companies (UK).
A list (FAQ) of UK
hosting companies is available.
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Virtual hosting:
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Hosting your server on a server farm (co-location) and probably virtual
hosting too:
Find server co-location
(hosting your machine at their site) in the uk via Google.com
or Mamma.com (meta-search engine):
Google.com
search:server+co-location+uk
Mamma.com
query:server+co-location+uk
Where I Host my Sites
Owning a domain is easy. Hosting a site is the difficult part.
Originally I hosted bluett.com on a machine
owned by Positive-internet.com.
For a year I had access to a database hosted by them, had unlimited bandwidth,
email access, and the ability to run cgis on their machine
and they looked after the maintenance. The thing is, after paying all of this money, what
did I do? Did I learn php (a scripting language
to connect to their database)? No, I created was a bunch of static pages that I
updated by hand and I made a hole in my bank
balance.
Now I am a member of the Hatters server cooperative,
we currently host our servers at loud-n-clear.net. This site, paler.com is hosted with
them.
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Server cooperatives
I am part of a group of people who run a shared server the Hatters (Hatters.org.uk),
a server cooperative.
The September 2000 edition of Internet.works (iwks.com,
no online copy of article) has an article on cooperative hosting mentioning
the Hatters.
Crosswired is a UK server
cooperative that is looking for new members, having found the numbers and more
for their first server.
Web cooperatives:
Internet
Cooperatives list from Dmoz.
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What to Look for
UK-hosting.org.uk
has information on what to look for in a hosting company.
Dmoz has a category on consumer
reviews of web hosting.
If you have a professional website, you should consider looking at how a
busy web
site was maintained by Philip Greenspun:
Ars Digita hosted at Exodus.net
(now part of Cable and Wireless).
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Free Domain Hosting
Free hosting for both your domain (the DNS for it) and website is possible.
The ISP Freeola, and probably others offer free domain
hosting on the condition that you update your html whilst logged on to them, which is ok if you don't mind connecting to
Freeola as an ISP.
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Free web page hosting
Looking for free space to host web pages (perhaps for a redirected
domain)? A quick dip into cyberspace for guides and sites revealed:
Dmoz has free web hosting
category, listing directories of free web hosting sites as well as
categorised individual sites.
freewebspace.net
- searchable guide to free webspace providers
Guide2web.com/links/free/webspace.html
- list of free web page hosting companies
- More lists of free web page hosting:
Searchlores.org/remobann.htm (another
page ) - how to remove banners from free web hosting sites. You
can also use search engines to look for pages on how to "remove pop-up
banners"
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Free DNS
Free DNS: Granitecanyon.com,
See their FAQ
for details. DNS secondarying etc. Try Dmoz's list of DNS
service providers,
which includes the Dynamic
DNS Providers List and the Domain
Names Parking category.
Monitor your website for free
The free Uptime
service can check your server every 15mins and warn you by email when it
goes down.
Other site monitoring sites are listed in the site monitoring
category at dmoz.org.
If
you do run your own server, you can run programs that check incoming mail
and mark it if it is spam, we use SpamAssassin
for this. There are other options, as listed the Spam
Filtering category.
Spam Reporting (Spamcop)
When
a spam email isn't picked up, you can report it using spamcop.net,
which keeps a list of servers that spam is currently coming from (this list
can in turn be used by SpamAssassin,
above, to filter spam). Be careful when reporting spam, before
reporting, remove any instances of your email address in the mail and any id
number that the spammer could have included to identify the recipient.
