queries re hosting

Hi and sorry for the total noob questions

My husband will be starting his own small business and we will need a website. I have a friend who is willing to create the webpages but obviously we will need somewhere to host them and also a domain.

I am lookingt for advice as to what I should be looking for. The website will be fairly simple but will have mails being sent to my husband.

I need something fairly inexpensive but reliable that can be used by non technical people

Get you husband to register the domain himself, with a domain registrar - say, Heart Internet.

That way, he retains control of the domain. The hosting is then less important as you can then move it anywhere you want.

You need a shared hosting account. I use WebFaction since they're cheap and allow me to create as many websites as I want under my account. NetHosted is also popular with users of this forum. Doubtless, others will have their own recommendations.

As to ease-of-use, hosting companies usually have a menu-driven control panel to allow you to set up your site. These control panels are all pretty much the same.

In reply to a post by micksharpe:

These control panels are all pretty much the same.

I dunno, some own brand panels are naff. Safer to stick with cpanel and plesk imo. ymmv tho.

Don't pay more that £10 for 2 years on a .co.uk domain, you should be able to get them for ~£6. Some sites charge way over the top. Just make sure they register it in your name and not theirs, as has been mentioned.

In reply to a post by 12eason:

Just make sure they register it in your name and not theirs, as has been mentioned.

Not quite what I said

I recommended that the OP did the registration themselves.

Oh right, so you did. Well, just to clarify then, some of the cheaper companies have been known to put domains in their name, so that when you try to move it away from them, you can't. It's an underhanded tactic for getting you to use their hosting packages for the life of the domain.

Heart are also quite good for hosting. They do a free package which allows 100Mb of traffic per month, which might suit you if the expected traffic is low. It's easily upgraded to a paid account for about £3 per month (or more depending upon what facilities you want). I started off with the free package but had to move to the cheapest paid package recently when my web site got a sudden rise in hits. It's always worked well for me and is fairly easy to administer.

It's not particularly easy to find this option from their web site, so here's a link to it.