Hosting Companies

[johnk]

Hi,

I was after some advice about choosing a hosting company for a site using Actinic Catalog 6 and probably Shared SSL or PSP. My only experience so far is with Internetters, but i have been looking at 4SureHosting as they seem to have very cheap (whats the catch) actinic packages. Anyway, If anyone has any advice about 4Sure or any other Hosts I would appreciate it, Thanks,

John

[pinbrook]

We can provide you with hosting. We can help with PSP or supply you with your own SSL cert. Our prices are on our website.

If you would like references I can ask some forum members who host with us to contact you.

please PM us or contact us via our website or phone

[Design R]

Hello John. We can also help you with your hosting. You can see our site at: http://www.designrweb.co.uk and this is also using Actinic.

We also have a help guide for Actinic users on our forums: http://www.forums.designrweb.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=6

Regards
Jay

[gerrymcc]

I signed up to 4SURE last week to test out Actinic Catalog. I spent days reading through the forum checking out problems and fixes but sure enough I had the usual initial problems on day one. I sent an email at about 20mins after mid-night to 4SURE and within 10mins had a reply. They started walking me through and even cleaned up my initial directory structure and set it up ready for my upload. They also emailed me the Network settings ready for import and by 1.10am my website was loaded and running. They are a great bunch and I would highly recommend them.

[Riplees]

Hello,
I am with Pinbrook hosting and can thoroughly recommend them.

Whipperleys Military & Outdoor (http://www.whipperleys.co.uk)

Anita

[Infolink]

We also now host quite a few actinic sites, plus we can add on our new range of PHP based managed functions.

Phil

[Megahertz]

Hi everyone

This might appear stupid, but I'm a beginner at this so forgive me!

I am setting up a web site to give advice and support in the field of portable appliance testing (electrical safety) and want to sell products through the website.

I have registered the domain name through UK2.net and signed up for their webspace. However, I got nowhere when trying to host the shop there. I have now discovered that I can upgrade my account to include CGI / PHP support but is this enough or are there other features that I need from the host?

At present I have the main site hosted on UK2 with the shop on actinic's own server (free trial due to end soon). I need to host the secure pages on a third host (secure hosting) for credit card processing so it's getting a bit messy!

I noticed another user is interested in 4sure, so I'm tempted to give these a try, but it would be cheaper for me to upgrade my UK2 space if this is going to work. If I do move to 4sure, am I right in thinking that I can 'move' the domain name to point to that space as well?

Any advice would be appreciated!

Tim James
:confused:

[pinbrook]

There are several hosting companies who specialise in hosting actinic sites. Some of these also freely give their time to this forum.

I would always choose one of these companies, because you will be getting a specialist service and a more personal one too. And you will find that the prices are competitive too

UK2 are not known as a specialist company, they provide cheap and cheerful hosting, which for a bog standard info site is fine.

I feel that if you are investing your time and money into an ecommerce venture you need to ensure good quality hosting - which is reliable and on a speedy server otherwise your customers will leave your site if they can 't access pages/products quickly.

In your case your best solution is to access your UK2 control panel to change the DNS records to those given to you by your chosen host. Then your site will then run on one server.

You can then choose whether to buy your own SSL cert..thus ensuring all of your shop continues to stay on the one server. Or buy Actinic's Sshared SSL which means the checkout will run on a 2nd server

[I-CC]

Hi Tim,

If you come over to 4SureHosting then you have the option at order time to either use DNS pointing which is where you direct the delegation for the domain to our Name Servers, i.e. you leave the domain with UK2, or you can transfer, the choice is entirely upto yourself.

As far as SSL is concerned, then you would have 2 options with us. One option is to get an SSL cert bound to your domain name which will require your own unique IP address for the hosting of your site with us, which all adds to the costs, or you can use our Actinic Shared SSL service for the collection of customer credit card details within an SSL environment.

Details of all of the above is available within our site and to be fair there are others within this and other areas of the net that can support Actinic hosting needs, although only a couple operate there own Actinic Shared SSL service.

We are not prone to jumping in and promoting ourselves in this manner normally, but as you have asked a specific question about 'if you went with 4sure etc etc', is the reason we have replied this time to a hosting - where can i question, as advertising ones self is not the done thing when a question is posed for users reviews of hosting companies, so we trust that this is appropriate.

[Jan]

I would also recommend hosting with a actinic specialist host. Ideally your host should run or manage lots of Actinic sites. This IMHO reduces the likely hood of you being told that 'it's not our fault, it is Actinic's fault' when you get a problem (lets face it you don't care who's fault it is you just want to get it fixed:-)).

Regards,

[Megahertz]

Just wanted to say Thanks Everyone for the advice. It's a lot clearer now and I seem to be getting somewhere finally!

[jonwbc]

Hi

I just managed to get UK2 to accept Actinic. Simply when it errors on the upload, cancel it and run it again. It is a bit messy but my site is now working fine on UK2