am setting up a site, bought the domain name and would like some recommends. on web hosts........

thanx

jim

I did a lot of shopping around for a web host and I decided to use godaddy.com and aplus.net

One thing I was sure to ask about is whether I would be charged automatically for exceeding bandwidth, or whether the site would be temporarily shut down for exceeding monthly bandwidth. Both godaddy.com and aplus.net will temporarily shut down the web site, rather than automatically charge you (although both web hosts offer a generous amount of bandwidth, so you shouldn't have to worry about this anyway).

Another thing I looked at is how many and what size of databases the plan comes with. aplus.net's $9.99 unix plan only gives you 3 mysql databases; the good part is that there isn't really a size limit on the databases. godaddy.com lets you have 25 mysql databases with their $6.99 plan (their MySQL database quota is subtracted from the 100GB disk space allocated to your hosting account). Other sites may have a storage limit on their databases.

There are a variety of other factors to consider such as storage space, number of FTP accounts, what server-side processing languages are supported (and what version), what version of PHP and MySQL they support, free software tools for building your website, number of [free] domains hosted, number of subdomains, etc.

I've never used Dreamhost, but it also seems like a good option. It seems to have the same features as the two previously mentioned hosts. The only thing that turns me off is the fact that they charge $1/GB of exceeded bandwidth, and I wouldn't want the possibility of unplanned charges (though you probably will not have to worry about exceeding their 1 TB limit). They may have an option to temporarily shut down the web site for the month like the other two hosts I've mentioned.