Thanks for the reply Mark.
I did some research in the meantime and slowly the pieces come together.
The redirection service that you're talking about is probably what people refer to as 'DNS' services and that indeed turn out to be the right solution.
Both the hosting company and registrar that I'm interesting in offer this kind of service. It seems that this hosting company A will provide me with the DNS information that I can use for my registered Domain at B.
It turns out that the forwarding options I was talking about earlier are only useful for people who host their sites on hosts that don't offer these DNS services; my own ISP for example, but also free hosts like Geocities.
Three sites have been very useful;
http://www.webhostingchoice.com (to find the best hosts)
http://www.100best-domain-name-registration.com/ (to find a good registrar)
https://internethosting.com/cgi-bin/internethosting/Domaingate.cgi?htmlpage=naminator.html (a more advanced way to find a domain name)
At the moment I?ve found a registrar and web host that both offer quality, reliability and service for a descent price. The domain name is costing me only $7.95 at a registrar that is recommended by several people/sites. Both companies have been in the business for quite some years.
The web host offers Unix hosting for $50 US a year, which doesn?t sound too expensive to me.
Included is;
Total Web Space 150 MB
Bandwidth Transfer 5000 MB
# of POP Email accounts Unlimited
# of Autoresponders Unlimited
# of Mailing Lists Unlimited
# of Sub Domains Unlimited
# of MySQL databases Unlimited
24/7 Support Included
99.5% Uptime Guarantee (5% of your monthly fee in return for every 30 min down time)
30-day Money Back Guarantee
cPanel 8 Control Panel Included
Web-based Email Included
Unlimited Pop E-mail accounts
Catch-all e-mail
Pop mail SPAM filters
FTP Access
Anonymous FTP Accounts
MySQL Databases Unlimited
CGI-BIN
Perl Modules Over 1100 Installed
Real Audio (not streaming) .ram files supported
Free Pre-installed CGI Scripts 13
PHP Support
Server Sides Includes (SSI)
Account and Site Log Files
Webalizer Site Statistics
Email Autoresponders Unlimited
Email Forwarding Unlimited
Frontpage 2002 Extensions
APACHE Handlers
Cron Jobs
e-Commerce Features:
Shared SSL Server $5/month
SSL Certificates & Secure Server $199.95/year + install fee
Password Protection for Directories
Agora E-commerce Shopping Cart
Redhat Interchange Shopping Cart
Daily Backups 1-Click Backups
MIME Types (Full Support) Enabled
The service seems to be great too. I contacted their sales AND support department by mail and in both cases they replied in a professional way in less than 5 min.
I think I?ll go for it, but like you said? first spending some extra time on reading the fine print.
Thanks Mark
