I'm moving house and will be using a connection-only ISP shortly with no SMTP/POP3, web hosting etc.

It's also getting tiresome having to switch email addresses whenever I change my ISP so I've decided to register my own domain-name.

What I'm looking for is:

• 50MB webspace (1GB/month transfer max.)
• POP3 and SMTP
• 5+ email addresses
• Asp
• ODBC (min. 1 db connection but would prefer MySql)
• Frontpage Extensions

Nice-to-haves would be:

• Free 1-off domain registration
• .NET
• Free sub domains
• MS Sql
• Webmail

I Googled earlier and got inundated. Can anyone suggest/recommend a fairly cheap provider please?

www.hostroute.co.uk are pretty good, but then again at work we got a complete W2K3 server from www.oneandone.co.uk for £80/month and they do them cheaper than that. No backup and single drive only, but we are only putting a single simple site that could be replaced in ten minutes.

Gareth

Thank you. I had found both of those earlier and, I think, was getting too MS-centric for my own good at the time and dismissed them and moved on.

It looks as though MS-hosted packages all run at about £10PM, which, on top of a £30PM ISP fee is more than I ideally wanted to spend.

I can keep the costs way down by choosing a *nix package but I'd really like to keep on using Asp if possible.

Still, for now, I'm seriously considering these two providers.

For starters, everyone's definition of "cheapish" (especially "cheapish") is going to be different, but you aren't asking for much, so you should find pretty good prices.

The host for my own site is Wiserhosting.com. It's funny, your post made me look at their home page for the first time in a few months, and they've actually changed their pricing plans around quite a bit. In fact, I notice that they have a plan that almost exactly matches your requirements, except for the SMTP as far as I can tell. That may be pretty big for you, but it does have webmail, and it's an amazing £27 per year. Domain registration is pretty cheap, too. UK domains are £2.89 and others are £8.99.

They've been a good host for the two or so years I've been with them. I'm also happily hosted on Ricin's servers, so you might want to talk to him. I have another site hosted there just because it suited the site better.

Good luck!

*edit*
By the way, I love Wiserhosting's webmail. They use Open WebMail, which I like a lot. I use it at work all the time to check all of my POP3 accounts.

I always wonder how these £20 a year places actually make a profit. They must be banking on the fact that nothing will go wrong usually and you'll not need to talk to technical support. If my query takes up 2 hours of a technical support guys time then I've already cost the company £20 then and there.

They'll also need to have a very large number of customers to just break even for the staff alone. Then there are colocation and hardware costs.

I've nothing against Wiserhosting, I've never even heard of them before but there are a few companies that do this and I've just been curious.

I'm amazed they can make a profit too. On one occasion, I had an issue that couldn't be sorted out in email, and they called me at my home from overseas! It's hard to figure out, but I've been with them for a while now and they seem to be doing better than when I started!

Wiserwebhosting looks pretty spot-on, just like you suggested, thanks.

You're right that their lack of SMTP support might be a show-stopper though; I will have a connection-only ISP.

Throwing this subject open:
They mention installable SMTP packages that will allow me to send SMTP mails locally but I've drawn a blank so far investigating this so the jury is still out.

I'm curious now; assuming that i get a package to send SMTP email, how will the message appear to the recipient? What I mean is; will I be connecting through isp.com but my return address will be webhosting.com; will the message appear to be sent from isp.com?

At work, we encounter a lot of problems with 'so called' spoof emails and the fact that a lot of email servers reject them, I want to avoid this happening to me.

It depends almost entirely on how the SMTP server is set up. The other part is how DNS is set up. That being said, sending email through an SMTP server that doesn't have the same domain name as your email address shouldn't be a problem. I'd worry more about the hosting facility's IP addresses getting put in a published list of spammers and being blocked for that reason.

but my return address will be webhosting.com

Your return address won't be webhosting.com, even if their servers are handling your incoming mail. You return address will be your domain that you have registered with webhosting.com

Check out whether the ASP hosting is what you want though - they seem to be using Sun ASP (aka Chillisoft), which isn't 100% MS compatible.

Gareth

I read some Sun blurb on this and they'd have me believe it's MS compatible. I'd side with you on this though and I appreciate your reservations. If I do any webpage stuff, I'd like it to be Asp'ish and that's the reason for my choice here - I hope I'm making the right decision!

To be truthful, there's not much I want to put on the net at this moment in time (apart from a house renovation photo gallery for relatives to look at), I'm more interested in an ISP-independant email address since I'll be moving to another ISP no doubt once this house is saleable and I'm getting fed up changing addresses. I know I could use an anonymous email service but they are regarded suspiciously when doing online shopping etc.

I'd worry more about the hosting facility's IP addresses getting put in a published list of spammers and being blocked for that reason

Please pardon my ignorance on this; you're talking about people with a similar setup to mine sending out tons of spam and getting blocked because of a hosting-provider blocking-rule I assume?

Correct. Many of the spam listers can be overly zealous.

I have used www.gradwell.com for email-only hosting (including outgoing). They are very reliable and I very much doubt they would ever be blacklisted. A bit pricey though.

I used to have email with Easyspace and they outsourced to www.everyone.net who's prices look reasonable.

As far as blacklisting you can easily check by searching in Google Groups on the provider name and then finding which IP address they send with and searching at http://www.ordb.org/lookup/

The only ones you really need to consider are Spamhaus's SBL and XBL lists, and possibly SPEWS. By the way SBL/XBL are extremely effective - anybody running a mail server is recommended to give it a try.

Gareth

It's like you said, gradwell.com is a little out of my price range. I wish I wasn't such a tight-ass

My host of choice's IP doesn't seem to appear in Google groups but I might not have searched properly. I've gone with Wiserhosting.com BTW.

After 2 emails I've committed and I've sent a cheque to wiserhosting.com and reg'd the domain with their promoted domain registrar; 123-reg.co.uk - so I'm fairly committed I suppose!

The clincher was Wiserhosting's prompt email responses over the weekend and also their offer to allow me access to their SMTP servers (for non-commercial use) if I was stuck for an SMTP alternative - this is all for the princely annual sum of £27, I'm impressed, very impressed!

Obviously, I'll want your home telephone number if it all goes horribly wrong, j/k!

Seriously, thanks (and to everyone else too) for helping me here

Cheers
Andrew

I'm very glad it all worked out! I was quite suprised myself by the very low price, especially given the reasonable amount of features you get for it. I also agree about the wonderful email support. I've got three sites hosted with them, and have always gotten quick responses when problems came up.

I am not using wiserhosting anymore. They simply weren't the best deal in town. Part of it's the exchange rate, though. I was paying almost $100 for 250MB of storage, and Dreamhost completely demolished that deal. Someone posted a promo code recently for the cheapest account that brought the cost down to something like $0.77 a month. Just use the code "777".

The whole safe mode thing was one of the reasons I left.