EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: Falcon69 on January 08, 2014, 05:13:06 pm
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Hello,
I am trying to sort through all the different web hosting sites. Dave has Hostgator posted on the main page, and I've checked them out (with his discount). Seems cheap enough.
Anyone have experience with them, or can recommend another site? I want customers to be able to pay using PayPal or credit cards. However, I don't have a business license, as the amount of yearly income from this would be very little. and I mean very little. Would I need a business license to accept credit cards (not through paypal).
So, the web host will need to accept paypal BUY NOW buttons and link to my paypal account.
What experiences or web hosting sites do you use?
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Hi
I have been using startlogic for many years and have been happy with them.
http://www.startlogic.com/startlogic/index.html (http://www.startlogic.com/startlogic/index.html)
You should not need a business (or tax ID (TIN) number). Most places will just ask for your social security number and use that as your tax id.
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Hey, in the US I have great experience with GoDaddy (http://www.godaddy.com/ (http://www.godaddy.com/)). That's where I host my blog and several auxiliary sides. While I only had good experiences, they're also some horror stories out there. After all, it's "You get what you pay for". I have all my domains hosted there and have my main webspace there as well. There was a big outage a while back where all Domains hosted via GoDaddy where not available for a few days. I think the EEVBlog was affected by that issue also. It was pretty annoying but GoDaddy gave me a month of free hosting without me even having to complain for that mess.
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In my opinion, Godaddy is a joke. Been there, done that. Paid hosting is really "you get what you pay for".
Want to have some real fun? Try finding free hosting with features compatible to paid hosting.
The best paid experience I've had support wise and overall would be Enom (http://www.enom.com).
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Hostgator is ok hosting. I use it for a few dozen sites - don't have any issues. Regarding the paypal - it has nothing to do with hosting. As a very simple and basic way you would put a paypal button on the site which you create yourself via paypal site. Check your paypal account for a guide. Pressing this button will redirect your customer to PayPal to finish a transaction.
I would strongly suggest to have all the credit card processing done on the paypal site and don't do this yourself and don't store CC numbers, etc. Why? - Liability. If PayPal handles financial transactions for you - it's all in theirs hands. You simply say what you sell, to whom and how much to charge.
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The only shared hosting I've used - after doing lots of research - was ICDSoft : http://www.icdsoft.com (http://www.icdsoft.com)
I was very impressed and happy with it for about two years, until I moved to using dedicated servers.
While I had account with them, servers were very fast, always responsive, they weren't overloading the servers (checked with reverse dns, only about 4-500 sites on the server). Support used to answer in 3-10 minutes each time I asked something.
They're not so "popular" (as in you don't see them advertised all over) because:
* you have only 100GB of disk space and 1TB of bandwidth per month (all the cheapskates look for unlimited everything but seriously, when you go over 1TB a month you move to dedicated server or something)
* you can only host ONE main domain per account and a limited number of subdomains (Godaddy and others put hundreds or thousands of websites on a server, lots of IO making reading files from remote hard disks slow etc). This works out in your favor because you know the server that hosts your site won't be overloaded with thousands of sites.
* they also charge in advance for the whole year (but you have 100 day money back guarantee). Basically, another plus compared to Godaddy and others because it removes all those script kiddies and spammers who buy for one month of hosting and then cancel but in the process they screw up the IPs for the whole server.
The customers paying you through paypal or credit cards has nothing to do with the company giving you hosting.
Go to paypal, set up a business account and go from there.
The hosting company has some scripts like Wordpress or eCommerce suites, you can install with a few clicks and then configure Paypal in them if you wish, or you can setup independently a Magento shop (and set paypal to work with it) or whatever other commerce system you wish.
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Hi,
My main domain IanJohnston.com lives on a dedicated server (Windows) at 1and1.co.uk. The actual box is located in Germany. It's been running about a year and I've had zero down time, zero problems.
http://www.1and1.co.uk/dedicated-server (http://www.1and1.co.uk/dedicated-server)
Why did I go for a dedicated server..............well, mainly just "because"......but the cost is surprisingly cheap!
To be honest my domains have travelled around the world on various shared servers (windows & linux) over the years.......but they all had issues in the end.......so I finally bit the bullet and went for a dedicated box. No regrets. Nice thing is you can offset costs if you really want to by hosting some of your friends domains etc. I do that, but just for fun mainly.
You don't need to be a business.
Ian.
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So, the web host will need to accept paypal BUY NOW buttons and link to my paypal account.
That has nothing to do with the web host, you just paste the code on your website regardless of who hosts it.
My website and forum use Hostgator. I also use HostMoster which is a good shared host company.
For your purpose they are all pretty much the same.
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Cool, so Paypal should be easy enough. But I think what I'm not understanding, is I don't think Paypal has a shopping cart? Is that just an add-on from the webhost, or do I need to do some type of html coding for that? With the discount from EEVblog, Hostgator is looking more and more desirable. $200 for 3 years, unlimited bandwidth and storage. So far, I only have 2 products to sell, but I'm hoping to expand later. So bandwidth right now probably isn't that big of a concern.
Ian, I noticed that with some WebHosts. They give you multiple domains. I never thought of that. Maybe I couls offset the cost by making websites for friends/family. Good tip.
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Many ways to go about this. PayPal do have a cart https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_shoppingcart-intro-outside (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_shoppingcart-intro-outside) as well as simple "buy now" buttons and everything in between. Those are usually simple Javascript snippets you put in your page's HTML. And like others said this is independent from your hosting provider, server type, etc. There are other payment options like Stripe which may be easier to use say via the wordpress plugins and such http://docs.tribulant.com/wordpress-shopping-cart-plugin/6050. (http://docs.tribulant.com/wordpress-shopping-cart-plugin/6050.) But that assumes you are running a Wordpress site (which based on the questions you are asking may be a good option for you).
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Cool, so Paypal should be easy enough. But I think what I'm not understanding, is I don't think Paypal has a shopping cart? Is that just an add-on from the webhost, or do I need to do some type of html coding for that?
Oh no, PayPal has a shopping cart for you! PayPal actually has very powerful interfaces for you. From simple "Buy Now!" buttons, over a shopping cart all the way to a fully documented automatic payment API.
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thanks for help everyone.
I decided to completely avoid godaddy after reading some horror stories and I went with Hostgator.
Now, I'm building my website.
I have a question for those with experience in Paypal and HTML
What I want to do is:
When someone clicks on the PayPal Add to Cart button, not only will the item add to cart, but, I want a flash (.swf) file to start playing. I want the paypal button to be on top, make the flash hidden until the button is pressed, and then the .swf plays and the button hides. After the flash plays and finishes, I want the button to come back. This all happens in a matter of seconds.
Cn someone help me out with this?
Basically, Using a 3d program I have and a flash program I have, I designed and made a flash where it shows the items going into a box, the box flaps fold, package label (generic) gets on package, then package moves to the right and fades. I think it will be kinda a neat feature to add.
So, I have access to the flash program and the file. If I need to do some programming in that, I can, but I need to be shown, taught, or given the code to do it in Lamen's terms. (i'm new to all this stuff, but trying hard to figure it out)
Thanks in advance for any help.
Jason
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Remember the golden rule:
ALWAYS AVOID 1&1 INTERNET
(http://www.jozefnagy.com/files/1and1.png)
If you thought the Dyson sucked, you obviously haven't made the grave mistake of trusting this bunch.
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Siteground.
Very good customer service and several hosting centres distributed globally.
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When someone clicks on the PayPal Add to Cart button, not only will the item add to cart, but, I want a flash (.swf) file to start playing.
You sure? It could be done but I can think of 100 reasons not to. Flash may have some niche applications (yours doesn't sound like one of them) but is so passe nowadays.
Here is a good example of the PP cart in action (and similar to what you are describing you need) - http://www.makarov.ca/vna_payment.htm (http://www.makarov.ca/vna_payment.htm)
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thanks for help everyone.
I decided to completely avoid godaddy after reading some horror stories and I went with Hostgator.
Now, I'm building my website.
I have a question for those with experience in Paypal and HTML
What I want to do is:
When someone clicks on the PayPal Add to Cart button, not only will the item add to cart, but, I want a flash (.swf) file to start playing. I want the paypal button to be on top, make the flash hidden until the button is pressed, and then the .swf plays and the button hides. After the flash plays and finishes, I want the button to come back. This all happens in a matter of seconds.
Cn someone help me out with this?
Basically, Using a 3d program I have and a flash program I have, I designed and made a flash where it shows the items going into a box, the box flaps fold, package label (generic) gets on package, then package moves to the right and fades. I think it will be kinda a neat feature to add.
So, I have access to the flash program and the file. If I need to do some programming in that, I can, but I need to be shown, taught, or given the code to do it in Lamen's terms. (i'm new to all this stuff, but trying hard to figure it out)
Thanks in advance for any help.
Jason
May I offer some simple advice: abandon flash-based solutions; they're old, buggy, clunky and are being replaced with HTML5.
Google "jQuery" :)
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May I offer some simple advice: abandon flash-based solutions; they're old, buggy, clunky and are being replaced with HTML5.
Google "jQuery" :)
+1 for that.
Dump Flash, Java and ActiveX for any exposed web interface.
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Coming from the world of professional web development (What I did before electronics), keep your site clean and simple, flash is too distracting, not guaranteed to work properly across platforms, and the biggest kicker is it gives you NO SEO value, can actually make it worse if you rely on flash heavily on a design. Also keep in mind that the biggest mistake people make in designing a website is designing it to look what they like, and not what works for everyone / general public, just cause you like cute furry dogs and crazy strong contrasting colors doesn't mean it will work well on a website (Just an example, I have seen people want crazier things on professional websites...).
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Coming from the world of professional web development (What I did before electronics), keep your site clean and simple, flash is too distracting, not guaranteed to work properly across platforms, and the biggest kicker is it gives you NO SEO value, can actually make it worse if you rely on flash heavily on a design. Also keep in mind that the biggest mistake people make in designing a website is designing it to look what they like, and not what works for everyone / general public, just cause you like cute furry dogs and crazy strong contrasting colors doesn't mean it will work well on a website (Just an example, I have seen people want crazier things on professional websites...).
^ Yup.
A great laugh:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell)
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This may not be relevant; I've never tried "web hosting," but if you're after a VPS then I can recommend digital ocean https://www.digitalocean.com/ (https://www.digitalocean.com/) They have a variety of hosting locations to choose from, and you pay for what you use on a minute by minute basis. Very nice if you need to spin up a new machine for testing for a couple of hours; costs a few cents.
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Coming from the world of professional web development (What I did before electronics), keep your site clean and simple, flash is too distracting, not guaranteed to work properly across platforms, and the biggest kicker is it gives you NO SEO value, can actually make it worse if you rely on flash heavily on a design. Also keep in mind that the biggest mistake people make in designing a website is designing it to look what they like, and not what works for everyone / general public, just cause you like cute furry dogs and crazy strong contrasting colors doesn't mean it will work well on a website (Just an example, I have seen people want crazier things on professional websites...).
^ Yup.
A great laugh:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell)
Was actually what I was thinking of when I said dogs and colors ROFL.
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May I offer some simple advice: abandon flash-based solutions; they're old, buggy, clunky and are being replaced with HTML5.
Google "jQuery" :)
Not that it has a shopping cart or anything but I just finished my wife's site in valid html5 / css3. It's why I haven't been here in a few days. Wordpress is so fubar for her I made the switch to Flatpress but had to port everything over to be html5 from xhtml. Fun stuff. Avoid flash like the plague. You won't be able to avoid javascript but also try and keep that to a minimum as well. There's nothing I hate worse than to see a site that has javascript widgets for no other reason than just to have them. Remember the users like me that don't have it enabled by default and degrade gracefully if at all possible. If you have something I want, I'll turn it on.
Oh, and just in case you want to see, cathysreadingblog.liquibyte.com.
Pay no attention to the fact that it doesn't validate. Webhost injects javascript tracking wrongly and I'm having a problem with the top domain so I removed the .htaccess file that keeps the site from doing that. After they fix things the .htaccess is going back in and it will validate.
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May I offer some simple advice: abandon flash-based solutions; they're old, buggy, clunky and are being replaced with HTML5.
Google "jQuery" :)
Not that it has a shopping cart or anything but I just finished my wife's site in valid html5 / css3. It's why I haven't been here in a few days. Wordpress is so fubar for her I made the switch to Flatpress but had to port everything over to be html5 from xhtml. Fun stuff. Avoid flash like the plague. You won't be able to avoid javascript but also try and keep that to a minimum as well. There's nothing I hate worse than to see a site that has javascript widgets for no other reason than just to have them. Remember the users like me that don't have it enabled by default and degrade gracefully if at all possible. If you have something I want, I'll turn it on.
Oh, and just in case you want to see, cathysreadingblog.liquibyte.com.
Pay no attention to the fact that it doesn't validate. Webhost injects javascript tracking wrongly and I'm having a problem with the top domain so I removed the .htaccess file that keeps the site from doing that. After they fix things the .htaccess is going back in and it will validate.
I don't really understand how anyone could have a descent web experience with javascript turned off... We don't live in an era anymore where a poorly written javascript would shut your browser down, in-fact there are entire gaming engines (Unity, Unreal 3, and others) that run in browser as compiled JS. For those that want to see that: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/ (http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/)
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May I offer some simple advice: abandon flash-based solutions; they're old, buggy, clunky and are being replaced with HTML5.
Google "jQuery" :)
Not that it has a shopping cart or anything but I just finished my wife's site in valid html5 / css3. It's why I haven't been here in a few days. Wordpress is so fubar for her I made the switch to Flatpress but had to port everything over to be html5 from xhtml. Fun stuff. Avoid flash like the plague. You won't be able to avoid javascript but also try and keep that to a minimum as well. There's nothing I hate worse than to see a site that has javascript widgets for no other reason than just to have them. Remember the users like me that don't have it enabled by default and degrade gracefully if at all possible. If you have something I want, I'll turn it on.
Oh, and just in case you want to see, cathysreadingblog.liquibyte.com.
Pay no attention to the fact that it doesn't validate. Webhost injects javascript tracking wrongly and I'm having a problem with the top domain so I removed the .htaccess file that keeps the site from doing that. After they fix things the .htaccess is going back in and it will validate.
I don't really understand how anyone could have a descent web experience with javascript turned off... We don't live in an era anymore where a poorly written javascript would shut your browser down, in-fact there are entire gaming engines (Unity, Unreal 3, and others) that run in browser as compiled JS. For those that want to see that: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/ (http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/)
"Descent" is, ironically, far more true, even thought I think you meant "decent". You don't think Javascript can crash a browser? You've not been surfing hard enough :D
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May I offer some simple advice: abandon flash-based solutions; they're old, buggy, clunky and are being replaced with HTML5.
Google "jQuery" :)
Not that it has a shopping cart or anything but I just finished my wife's site in valid html5 / css3. It's why I haven't been here in a few days. Wordpress is so fubar for her I made the switch to Flatpress but had to port everything over to be html5 from xhtml. Fun stuff. Avoid flash like the plague. You won't be able to avoid javascript but also try and keep that to a minimum as well. There's nothing I hate worse than to see a site that has javascript widgets for no other reason than just to have them. Remember the users like me that don't have it enabled by default and degrade gracefully if at all possible. If you have something I want, I'll turn it on.
Oh, and just in case you want to see, cathysreadingblog.liquibyte.com.
Pay no attention to the fact that it doesn't validate. Webhost injects javascript tracking wrongly and I'm having a problem with the top domain so I removed the .htaccess file that keeps the site from doing that. After they fix things the .htaccess is going back in and it will validate.
I don't really understand how anyone could have a descent web experience with javascript turned off... We don't live in an era anymore where a poorly written javascript would shut your browser down, in-fact there are entire gaming engines (Unity, Unreal 3, and others) that run in browser as compiled JS. For those that want to see that: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/ (http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/)
"Descent" is, ironically, far more true, even thought I think you meant "decent". You don't think Javascript can crash a browser? You've not been surfing hard enough :D
Of course it can, but honestly in my very broad use of the internet I have not encountered it very often, at least not for a very long time. If anything lately flash has become horribly unstable above anything.
My point was that the internet uses a lot of javascript, I personally have nothing against this because it has really brought on some amazing ways to build websites and blur the lines between what we thought a website was, and what we thought an application was. Case in point the current switch to mobile devices. More often then not most of these apps on your android or iPhone are written in HTML/JS, with an OS level loader being a fullscreen website for the app, this is how a lot of apps get around being mufti-platform including by website.
To me the concept of turning your javascript off seams like it would cripple current functionality of the internet to non-usability. But at the same time I am pretty in-tune to the modern "internet", spent many years developing many of these new-fangled web 2.0 things, and often use them myself even in-house because it's just much easier, quicker, and simpler and provides a better experience. Sure I can develop a PCB using a pencil and piece of paper, or I can use Altium and get live 3D models on demand, just as I can use the web for basic email and such with no JS, or you can use JS and actually get nice integrated experiences that accelerate productivity and experience. Just my 0.02 on it hehe.
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If you like looking at static web sites, keep JS switched off, but if you need dynamic updates and parts of the page content refreshed according to certain events then you are going to need JS (ajax).
Don't confuse Java with Javascript either, they are two different animals. Java should have been shot at birth, it's just malware.
jQuery is one of several modern JS frameworks that allow better content delivery.
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Java should have been shot at birth, it's just malware.
Whole lot of malware - http://langpop.com/ (http://langpop.com/)
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I don't really understand how anyone could have a descent web experience with javascript turned off... We don't live in an era anymore where a poorly written javascript would shut your browser down, in-fact there are entire gaming engines (Unity, Unreal 3, and others) that run in browser as compiled JS. For those that want to see that: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/ (http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/)
When used well, JS can be good for things like dynamic content updates etc. but I've seen plenty more annoyances from badly coded sites using JS as well.
Modern processors are very good at consuming low amounts of power, but only when they're idle. If there's some stupid animation or transition or some other annoying effect that's it's doing on a page, power consumption shoots up rather dramatically compared to just browsing some static pages. This is even more important on a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone.
I keep JS off unless it's needed for a site I must use.
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I don't really understand how anyone could have a descent web experience with javascript turned off... We don't live in an era anymore where a poorly written javascript would shut your browser down, in-fact there are entire gaming engines (Unity, Unreal 3, and others) that run in browser as compiled JS. For those that want to see that: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/ (http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/)
When used well, JS can be good for things like dynamic content updates etc. but I've seen plenty more annoyances from badly coded sites using JS as well.
Modern processors are very good at consuming low amounts of power, but only when they're idle. If there's some stupid animation or transition or some other annoying effect that's it's doing on a page, power consumption shoots up rather dramatically compared to just browsing some static pages. This is even more important on a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone.
I keep JS off unless it's needed for a site I must use.
My laptop gets 9 hours battery with firefox open with 40 websites, Altium Designer, xTimeComposer, MatLab, usually 2 to 8 PDF's, 4 to 10 Windows Explorer Windows, and usually random other crap, so I don't really get your argument about power consumption. Now if I open up a game that uses 3D graphics my battery drops to about 3 hours.
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Short of the specialized tags for audio, video, and some misc embedded items, is there any difference between html 4 strict and html 5? In this I mean if a page fully validates in html 4, by changing the doctype would it still validate as html 5? The reason I'm asking is that I've got a site that's almost completely php/MySQL driven and the idea of having to go through it and fully rework the thing from top to bottom doesn't exactly thrill me. Is there something I'm missing in the syntax or am I looking for problems that just aren't there?
As an aside, here's one hell of a youtube reference if you're thinking about scratch building a website...
https://www.youtube.com/user/flashbuilding (https://www.youtube.com/user/flashbuilding)
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if a page fully validates in html 4, by changing the doctype would it still validate as html 5
Theoretically, if you haven't used any of the tags and properties html5 deprecated it could validate. I haven't seen it happen though. Here is a list of what changed - http://www.tutorialspoint.com/html5/html5_deprecated_tags.htm (http://www.tutorialspoint.com/html5/html5_deprecated_tags.htm) . And this is what people do to fix that (one of many, google around, there are even scripts and things which claim to automate it) - http://tech.patientslikeme.com/2010/08/17/step-by-step-blog-conversion-to-html5/. (http://tech.patientslikeme.com/2010/08/17/step-by-step-blog-conversion-to-html5/.) Why do you want to switch to html5? Want to use some of the new tags or something? Depending on the page you could switch without the page strictly validating, the browser will in most cases render your content, no problem. It's best if it validates of course...