There is an urgency now for a web hoster to host our main www.singaporemagiccircle.com domain.
Does anyone know any good and reliable web hoster that does not charge prices like they are robbing layman?
Reliable is the keyword, that mean good uptime and reasonable bandwidth. It mustn't be slower than what we are having now.
I would also prefer a local company so that if it does screw up, i can walk into their office and bang their tables.

Recommendations anyone?

Check these host out...

IWI webhosting (local host - my brother's site is currently hosted with this company)(recommanded as its unlimited bandwidth/e-mail)

SG Hosting (local host - check out their monthly promotion - I'm eyeing for this as its quiet cheap... bad point is that its not unlimited bandwith)

W3hub(NOT hosted locally but you might want to take it as a comparison)

Is the host u want to build a site or host forum,?

Yo,

http://www.cjb.net/ is popular. Loads of societies have sites there. Don't think there's a local agent, though.

iamthewalrus

Here we go:

HOST ROCKET!!! WOOHOO!!!

Not a local host, but pretty reliable from what I know. Prices are pretty reasonable IMO, so I'd recommend this if you're too lazy to go around and bang on tables. Just spam their inboxes with gay porn if the server goes down.

-Kev

Where are all the IT people to provide advice..hm...

Morphine, tell me your requirements for the provider, as in what would like you to do with the website?

Move the forum there, set up e-mail accounts, and so forth.

I would prefer an overseas provider, they are many good providers out there which would not give any problems, and are infact better than what you get in Singapore for a better price.

Lunar Hosting

This is my recommendation.

US $7.95 = SG $13.10

Let me break down the feature set for you, I will do this in a total layman style for those who are unfamilar with this.

Unlimited E-mail Accounts

Unlimited E-mail Forwarding

Forwarders are special E-mail address that will forward E-mails send to a certain address to another.

Unlimited E-mail Auto Responders
The Computer will autmatically send a reply for any E-mail it recives to the sender, you can customize the message and control when it gets sent.

30-Day Money Back Guarantee
In case you do not like them, but at $13, even if they don't its not too bad.

Web Mail
Any E-mail Account you set up can be used as a Web E-mail like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail.

Online Control Panel
Basically all the functions they have can be controlled through here, its at least to me relativly idiot proof, you can try the demo and see if you like it

PHP, PYTHON & PERL
These are a programming langauge which can be used to make websites interactive.

1000 MB Storage
This is a nice one, 1 gig of storage is a lot for a website. The current SMC main page is 48k. that means you can have 1,000,000kb (1,000 MB) / 48 = 20,000 (est) pages. More than enough.

CGI-BIN
Common Gateway Interface BIN - A rather Old Technology to make website interactive, will useful but a lot of people do not use this anymore.

40GB/Month Bandwidth
A normal person surfing the web uses 1 gig a month. of that a single website could take only a few megabytes of that. 40 gig I would reckon would easily manage say 1,000 people on the fourm


ASP, JSP & Servlets available
Again a Technolgy to make websites interactive, but this is more powerful, commonly used to interface with other functions.

MySQL Database
Popular Website Database system

Add-On Domain available
Simple more than 1 Domain can be pointing to your site.

99.9% Uptime
this equals to 9hrs a year downtime. A rather tough number to uphold, I am still in training to design networks to be 99.999% uptime, I know how tough the job is, and I give them credit for already being less than 12 hrs a year.

3 Parked Domains
refer to Add-on Domains

FrontPage Extensions
If you use Frontpage to design your website, there are some features that require support from the server. I recommend not using this as it forces people to use Internet Explorer to view the site.

15 Sub Domains
say the doman is www.smc.com, a sub-domain replaces the "www" prefix with something else. forum.smc.com, coinmagic.smc.com and so forth.

Dreamweaver Compatible
Same as frontpage, but not browser specfic

FTP Account
You will use this to tranfer the website up.

POP3, SMTP & IMAP
These are the 3 different mail protcools used on the net to check mail, its good that is supports all, flexabilty is there.

SSI - Server Side Includes
Encryption for the site if you need it, should be 128bit.

Fantastico Script Library
A collection of commonly used CGI or perl scripts

Online User Statistics
This is Very useful to you Morphine, you can see how many people are viewing the site and at what time, what do most of them do and how you can improve the site.

2,000 Mbit Connectivity
Trust me, when I say its like having a Aircraft runway and you are just walking there on your own. Thats that big a connection.

High-End Servers
Its uses a 2.8 Ghz Xeon system from dell, its a good machine, nothing to worry there.


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There is one important reason why I prefer overseas over local

We are NOT restricted by Singapore Censorship, there are other details, but in short. The country in which the website is located is thats countries respective law. (Media and Broadcasting Laws)

The sudden urgency for the hoster is because as we are doing more events and work, our registered url www.singaporemagiccircle.com is gonna receive some curious traffic.
It wouldn't be very relevent for them to come straight into the forum because the forum doesn't make a lot of sense to layman. And of course there's the increased possibility of people coming in and making pesky "please teach me how to do that" kinda posts.

The reason I haven't locked the forum with an questionaire test before someone gains entry is because i'm still trying my best to keep it web crawler friendly. I've done too much on the search optimisation to lock it down now. Heart very pain B)
But if we have a public front page, we can move the forum deeper into the branches and keep it out of the sight of the casual browsing eyes, yet accessible enough for people seriously looking.

The "bang table" factor is quite important to me because when something screws up (and when it comes to IT, something WILL screw up), I wanna be able to ruin someone's day over the phone even if I dun go knocking on their office door. It's much less fun when I have to pay long dist. to shout at someone. B)
But I'm flexible on that, and I haven't crossed out any options.

So I'm looking for a reasonably fast connection server with healthy bandwidth and not too high prices, preferrably local. Know anyone guys?

http://www.saintshaven.net/

here ya go... while he doesnt have a company, i know the guy quite well and he has msn to provide support with. iirc, his server is in pacnet datacenter.

Morphine, I agree the bangtable factor is important to a certain extent. But I have never found the pricing of Singapore hosting to be competitive to the US, Singapore is generally a more expensive place to host a site.