How To Create Your Own Website--Web Hosting, Shopping Cart...

[daisymae]

What host do you use and which shopping cart? Im looking for a reasonable one. TY!!

[hipgirl]

1. I use hostmonster--Host Unlimited Domains On 1 Hosting Account for web hosting. The rate was $4.95/month (now it's $5.95) with free domain name--2years contract required. Money back in 30 days if you are not satisfied. So far, I'm satisfied with their service and support.

***Want to lower the rate a little bit? Click the link above to sign up, I'll refund you $45 on your next hipgirl boutique purchase (or $25 cash to your PayPal account). Please PM me for detail


Here are some of the features:


* 300 Gigabytes of Hosting Space (more than enough! My store and forum occupied less than 1GB.

* Host UNLIMITED Domains!! --So you can host several different online stores if you sell different products (retail, wholesale...) 100% free.

* Unlimited Pop/Imap Email Accounts -- I only use 2.

* 3,000 Gigs of Transfer (Bandwidth)--enough for small business. My store and forum only use 2% of the limit.

* Free Domain Forever -- nice

*Perl, PHP, MYSQL, Front Page -- means you can run almost any website

2. I use free shopping cart software Zencart-- free, open source shopping cart software from Zen Cart. Hostmonster has it consolidated into the application. Just need to click a button and it installs the shopping cart automatically. To view the feature of the zen-cart shopping cart, please browse my store: Hip Girl Boutique!, Hair Bows, Baby Hair Clips, Rockabilly Hair Accessories and more.. The best part of it is: it's FREE.

3. I use Vbulletin for forum. The cost is $180/year.

Michelle

[phins_jazy]

Thanks for the info michelle. I've been using godaddy for my hosting and shopping cart. I can only have 20 items in my store and it costs me $15 a month!!! Is there a limit on what you can have with the zen cart? I'd love to be able to have all my items listed. Off to check them out!

[hipgirl]

Originally Posted by phins_jazy

Thanks for the info michelle. I've been using godaddy for my hosting and shopping cart. I can only have 20 items in my store and it costs me $15 a month!!! Is there a limit on what you can have with the zen cart? I'd love to be able to have all my items listed. Off to check them out!

No limit at all. I used to list over 1000 items in the store but I've disabled most of the hairbows and hair clip items since I don't have time to make them.

And there is a simple add-on on zen-cart--easy populator (free too), it allows you to download all your items to a spread sheet, then you can edit (update, add new items... ) this spread sheet and upload to your website. It's a pain to list hundreds or thousands of the items manually especially they are similar items. Each product requires at least 3 clicks: 'add new product', 'preview' and 'confirm'. With this easy populator, I was able to add more than 200 items within 1 hour. Very nice.

And Zen-cart can be installed on any webhosting server. If you do not want to switch webhosting company, you can download the software from zen-cart.com and install it on you godaddy server.

Michelle

[Shyone44]

Thank you for all the great info Michelle

[rn4picu]

Great info Michelle!! THANKS

[Miranda]

I think you may be converting me Michelle. Are you happy with hostmonster? Any down time or complaints? I am currently using a different host and its 7.00 a month (with free shopping cart) but the customer service is lacking. There have been issues with sites being down for nearly a week (thankfully I was affected by that one) and email was down a week or so ago. I guess I just don't feel 100% secure with them.

[hipgirl]

Originally Posted by Miranda

I think you may be converting me Michelle. Are you happy with hostmonster? Any down time or complaints? I am currently using a different host and its 7.00 a month (with free shopping cart) but the customer service is lacking. There have been issues with sites being down for nearly a week (thankfully I was affected by that one) and email was down a week or so ago. I guess I just don't feel 100% secure with them.

I'm happy with them.

No downtime since I subscribed last Nov. But there is a day (a couple of weeks ago) that the forum and store is running slow. It was Saturday or Sunday and I opened up a tickets via email and they helped me to pin point the problem. Before we found the problem the site was running OK. So I closed the ticket. They told me that I should've opened the ticket by call there support hot line to get the reponse promptly. The support is not as good as those highly paid services. I'm an Oracle database administrator. My employer paid $$$$$ for Oracle's support. Normally I get response for the priority one ticket within 2 minutes. But consider hostmonster's support is included in $4.95/month, I'm satisfied. I did some research online before choosing webhost company and a lot of review sites have hostmonster as top 5 hosting company.

One thing I want to mention: They do not offer dedicated server services. A lot of the domains share 1 server. The hits of other domains may affect your performance. After the slowness of my site, I asked if there is an option for dedicated server and they said no. I don't mind because the market price for dedicated server is $50 and up/month and I don't want it anyway.

I'd say hostmonster is great for 'first time buyer' like me. Maybe after the forum grows bigger and bigger (I hope so). I need to move it to a dedicated server.

Michelle

[daisymae]

i just signed up with hostmonster. did you desing your site or hire it out?

[hipgirl]

Originally Posted by daisymae

i just signed up with hostmonster. did you desing your site or hire it out?

The online store is 'shopping cart software'. I uploaded my own header image. changed several backgroud image and that's all. All come with the software. I like the plain and simple look.

Michelle