Thanks for all your comments.
Klaas, of course you were right about unlimited bandwidth. The first company I e-mailed about their offer of unlimited BW told me actually I
am limited to 25% CPU. If it sounds to good to be true.........
Lawree, thank you for the links. They were very helpful, especially the one called "Everything You Need to Know About Web Hosting." I learned a lot including what questions to ask a Web Hosting company before deciding to sign up. I was able to narrow it down to just 3 companies from this. Thanks again!
Hi Linda. Thanks for your insight. I read in another post about the problems you had with trying to move your site recently and that is what helped me to really appreciate how important it is to try and choose the right hosting company from the start. I'm sorry you had that experience. I hope you find another company that can give you what you need without the headaches! I am still interested in SBI. I had hoped to get some detailed comments from users to help me make a decision. Should I post that question in another place, or was this the right place for it? BTW, I used your suggestion about searching "hosting comp. sucks" and it worked great. I was able to get so much more information than I was searching the other terms, and it helped me cross some bad ones off the list. Thank you, thank you!
Thanks TheCaymanHost for your comments. You touched on some points I needed information on and didn't ask yet and things I hadn't thought of but am glad to know! I am planning on having multiple forums on my site, or maybe it's a forum with multiple sub-forums? I don't really know how that works yet. So I will make sure to look for a hosting company that supports the different programs you suggested. I hadn't heard of Drupal or Joomla before. I bookmarked their sites after I read your post and will look at them tonight. I don't know if they can intimidate me anymore than Dreamweaver did.
I'm pretty much feeling intimidated by this whole process and all the things I need to learn anyway. But I've been wanting to do this for a long time, talking about it for a year now and I'm ready to stop talking and start doing. So anything that can help me get up and running the fastest without compromising quality I'm interested in.
I hope you all don't mind a couple of more questions that came up after reading and applying your posts. One thing I've had trouble with, since this will be my first site, is determining how much web space and resources I really need. I looked up the site that will be my main (really my only) competition at Alexa.com. Alexa says that site's traffic is almost half a million. I don't know if that means weekly or monthly or what. The sites will be similar in that they will both have multiple forums, but with some differences. Their site is a pay site, mine will be free (hopefully making it more appealing), and I will have different additional content and resources available to users. Should I use their site traffic to determine how much mine might be? If so, I still don't know how that translates into gigabytes and bandwidth. What is your opinion on space I would need as a minimum to start? And I'm assuming I should choose a hosting company that can upgrade me to a dedicated server if and when my site did become that popular.
Second, one of the hosting services I have on my list had this in their terms of usage:
Quote:
The customer must not:
Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. Applications include: FTP, PHP, HTTP, CGI, PERL, and others.
File sharing on the ___________ network is forbidden, this includes peer-to-peer actives.
Run any sort of software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
Run any stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server.
This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
Run CRON entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes
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Based on what you do know about my future site, does any of this sound like it might be a problem for me later? I'm not sure what "stand-alone, unattended server-side processes" are. Does that mean an un-moderated forum? The 25% - this is from the company that says you get "unlimited bandwidth." Is that common or a red flag?
Lastly, any opinions on SMF forum software? I did a search on these forums and didn't get any search results. Maybe I'm using the wrong search terms. I've seen vBulletin and will look into that too. Any comments on forum software would be helpful or if you could point me to any links where it might have already been discussed I will read them all.
Thank you again for all your helpful comments. I really do appreciate it! Before I found this site I was completely overwhelmed, but I'm feeling hopeful and excited now - like I can really do this - thanks to you.