Web site creation, management and hosting

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Anyone know a good, reasonably priced hosting service for my realtor?

She had one through some company (intric?) and her sites been dead a couple of weeks now, and she cant seem to get anyone to fix it. And this has happened before. And her email account is getting pelted by about 400 pieces of spam a day.

She need someone to recreate her site, basic realtor home page with an email link, a couple of links to her search engine and her realty companies page for her, a couple of pictures, some text. Nothing complex, but nothing *I* wanna get into the tech support loop on. Good uptime, not too expensive and good spam filtering on the email side. Turnkey...she's not into page creation or maintenance, maybe a minor change or two or three per year (phone #, address stuff).

Any suggestions for her? She's in the Sacramento area, so a few extra points for a local business rather than some gigantic national mill.

Any help most appreciated.

(Yes, i'm going to get these 'intric' guys on the phone and rattle their cages, but sounds like they're a half assed outfit)

 

[justin]

wonder if the company you are referring to is "intrex". That's a small company local to my area and they service our small engineering firm's computers and network. Costly and semi-reliable. Equipment purchased from them is very expensive, low quality, and frequently outdated. For some reason we keep using them as our tech provider... :

 

[lowflyer]

Good luck on this one. I just moved my stuff to dot5hosting.com. They had a good looking website and seemed reasonable. Signed up, got all the info I needed via e-mail and then proceded to set up new e-mail accounts and transfer my website over. All went well. $70 for a year. Probably can even get it cheaper if you try.

Many/most of these mass webhosting companies seem to be very much the same. As long as you understand how this stuff works, you're probably okay. If you need help, watch out. Chat sessions are less than helpful and if you call, you'll probably get someone outside of the US who might or might not get the point of your problem. They are ususally very, very good at saying "thank you for contacting xxxxx, we appreciate your business." That all sounds good, but it usually comes at the end of a very frustrating/painful conversation.

 

[wabmester]

Don't all large brokers have their own in-house web staff?

If she's a small fry, there are a bunch of people who specialize in building sites for realtors with IDX feeds, etc.

I'm only familiar with a couple around Seattle, but they can probably give you a lead.

http://www.caffeinatedsoftware.com/

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Eh, she gets a page from Coldwell Banker but she's been in the business for a hundred years and likes the idea of having her own "www.myname.com" web site that she can put stuff on and get picked up by search engines, or just tell her customers "go to www.me.com!" for their MLS searches.

Its a pretty simple page. A photo of her, an email addy, phone numbers, her experience and what she specializes in, a link to her coldwell banker page, a link to the MLS search tool she pays to have access to, etc. Something someone who does it every day could whip up in an hour or two.

Turns out the page was made by a buddy of hers who stuck it on a server he owns, and his server is down all the time. He's registered her domain name with Tucows. I told her she needs to get him to release the domain name to her and put her page contents on a cd or dvd and send it to her. Not sure how the domain name transfer would go but presume 'carefully' to keep someone from grabbing it and squatting on it.

 

[FIRE'd@51]

Not sure how the domain name transfer would go but presume 'carefully' to keep someone from grabbing it and squatting on it.

She should find out right away when her domain name is set to expire. So long as she (or her friend) renews it before it expires, nobody can "grab" it until the next expiration. If it expires, she could lose it right away if someone has requested it. If she has sufficient time until it expires she can wait until she finds a new web hoster and they will either transfer it for her or give her the DNS numbers for TUCOWS to point it to. Many hosters offer domain registration as part of their package. It may be cheaper to leave it with her current registrar and just have them point it to the new hoster's server.