Our church is looking for a new web host (currently they use netfirms, but they seem to be a bit fly-by-night, and the contract is up, so before we renew it, we want to look into other places a bit).
They really only need PHP and MySQL (and plain HTML), and a way to edit the database records *other* than through the PHP stuff on our site. (They have one table: the source data for a calendar. We didn't want to let just anyone add/edit/remove entries, and we didn't want to mess with authentication, so the initial PHP author didn't add any interface to make changes. Up until now we've just been using netfirms' interface to edit the table.)
They also need email forwarding (where the host's incoming server can be listed as the MX for the church's domain, and will forward any email to other accounts that they can actually get to). Actually I bet it would work OK to retrieve mail from the provider, but I'd want to make sure the authentication was well-encrypted (i.e. an IMAP-over-TLS type setup) if we did that.
Anyway, I believe that's all they require. ServerNorth is supposed to be fairly good, right? Although they're in Canada -- that's not a problem for me, but it may be for others that would have to approve a change. We're in the U.S.
One question on their packages, though, if we have any ServerNorth customers or admins here: Under the "advanced web hosting" package, can we use the "email accounts" to set up "pastor-<squiggle>-<our-domain>-dot-org", "youth-<squiggle>-<our-domain>-dot-org", "office-<squiggle>-<our-domain>-dot-org", etc.? Or would that require the "business advanced" package because we need more than one local-part?
Otherwise, anyone else ever used a web host (any at all, not just ServerNorth) that can handle what we need? What did you (or do) you think of them?
(I should also note that netfirms is no good *at* *all* at removing you from their quarterly spam list ("we have new features!" "guess what: I don't care!"). I've asked them four or five times now, to no avail. That's a huge part of the reason I'd like to find someone else. Another part is that when they forward email, the outgoing server that they use keeps changing, and their address block is on various blacklists for who knows what reason. Anyway, people start getting bounce messages. The fact that their outgoing mail server keeps moving around makes me a bit suspicious anyway. So anyone that doesn't have those issues will make me happy. :-) )
I'll check back in ~4 hours or so, once I'm home from work. Thanks! |
