Does anyone have any recommendations for email and web hosting providers?

[lethargic_man]

Does anyone have any recommendations for email and web hosting providers?

At present I use my ISP for email and for my website. My website doesn't have much on it, and I suspect most of what's there never gets looked at, but there are a few things I find it useful for hosting, such as my Jewish learning notes index, the Wandering Jews Friday night siddur and photos which I share online. Sometimes I post the latter to Facebook, but I don't like partial loss of control over my images which uploading photos to Facebook or Flickr involves, so more often I don't. (Also my Hebrew and Arabic entry forms, and the web version of my CV, and, for a few weeks each year, the register of people coming for a meal in my succah.)

All this is going to change, however, shortly, when I terminate my contract with my ISP when I move. aviva_m doesn't appear to have a similar deal with her ISP, so I need to find replacements. GMail is an obvious contender for hosting my email, and I believe I can continue downloading my email with POP3, Internet-child of the 1990s as I am. liv, remind me why you won't use GMail, and what you recommend instead...?

One possibility for web provisioning would be to switch to using the company that provides my domain; this would save me £10 a year redirecting emails and URLs, but cost me £30 a year for the hosting. This seems a bit steep to me, for my needs (simple hosting (no CGI required), low capacity (currently 105Mb), low traffic), but maybe that's par for the course; I'm not used to paying for a website separately. Does anyone else have any recommendations?

Comments

[karen2205]

I use Mythic Beasts for both website hosting and email provision - POP3/IMAP still available and like them, though don't imagine they're anywhere close to being the cheapest.

[lethargic_man]

Mythic Beasts are actually my current domain providers; they're the £30 a year I was trying to avoid...

[liv]

I don't use Gmail because Google want to put everything I do online together into one profile and not only sell it to advertisers (which I'm reluctantly ok with, it's the price you pay for a free-as-in-beer service), but expose the links to everyone it thinks might be a "contact" of mine. Given the way they handled things like Buzz and Google+, I am scared their helpful algorithms will do things like breaking the anonymity of this journal or letting my students find my non-professional online profiles. Not letting them have my correspondence or my email address book makes this somewhat less likely. I'm not eschewing them altogether; I have an unrooted Android smartphone, so they could probably still screw me over, and I use some other Google services.

My preferred alternative is Zoho, which is specifically designed for disaffected Gmail users. I pay them something in the region of £15 a year for a basic email plan, because I am getting to the point where I actively want to pay money for services rather than pay the hidden costs of using advertising-based services. I believe they do now have some free options too, especially if you have your own domain, but I haven't really looked into that, and those are subsidized by paid and business accounts rather than supported by advertising. They offer POP3 (which I also use) and not completely unlimited space but decent amounts of space. I assume you probably archive your email on hard disks you control, as do I, so Gmail's essentially infinite storage space isn't a big draw for me.

Zoho do offer website hosting as well, but I haven't tried to use that. I'm currently using NearlyFreeSpeech. They're very much geared to the sort of thing you are talking about with web hosting. Basically they charge for the traffic and features you actually use, so if you only need static HTML and only need a place to store stuff that's rarely looked at, the minimum price is 1¢ per day ie about £2.50 per year. They don't have a lot of customer service or a very shiny user interface; their publicity explicitly says that they expect users to know what they're doing, which is another reason I think they might suit you.

There are advantages to doing your domain hosting, web hosting, email and ISP all with the same company, but I'm currently not going down that route.

[lethargic_man]

Thanks for the recommendations. I've just looked into NearlyFreeSpeech and they're USAn and do not appear to be part of the Safe Harbor data protection agreement. Do you know of any equivalent that is (or is based in the EU in the first place)?

[lethargic_man]

Update to my earlier comment (might also be of interest to jack): After googling for a while failing to find any email provider that was (a) free or cheap, (b) ads-free, (c) didn't involve selling my soul to Mister Clevver,^* and (d) was run either by a European company or one that subscribed to Safe Harbor (don't ask why I'm so paranoid about this; it's a point of principle, and I really do have nothing to hide), I suddenly remembered my Cantab.net account languishing completely unused.

Guarantee of no ads, UK based, free webmail (not quite good enough for me), Pro account for £12 a year, but even better: POP/SMTP bolt-on to Free account for £8 a year. (Also, should I decide not to go down the hostinger.co.uk route, web hosting for £5 a year with a 100Mb limit (which is a bit tight for me), £10 a year for 1000Mb.

Looks like I probably have a solution to my, ah... conundra?.

* Was just thinking the other day how I should add Riddley Walker to my to-reread list. This presumably unconsciously inspired by having just finally (about thirty years after I first intended to) read The Box of Delights.

[nancylebov]

webhostingtalk.com is a gigantic web host review site.

[jack]

I also find it really difficult to find anything between "free" and "expensive". I wonder if something like getting a free Heroku account (or one of the other free code hosting sites, amazon?), but just using it for static HTML, would be easier and more reliable than trying to find somewhere commercial.

[lethargic_man]

This looks worthy of further consideration.