Joel Rees wrote:
Now, to forestall your next diatribe, Craig said his friend needed an e-mail address and a net presence in a real hurry. He did not say he needed a full-blown business site, just a net presence. He did not say in a couple of days, he said tonight.
For what it's worth, if you really mean basic presence, right spanking now, I'd go with GoDaddy. Sure there are downsides to GoDaddy, but when it comes to quick and easy setup of an email presence and a basic web site (using your choice of content management systems) - they're quick, easy, and inexpensive.
I say this as someone who used to run a small hosting service, and still does most of my personal and business hosting on a Debian cluster that I own, sitting in a commercial data center, that I maintain. But, when I had to set up a web site for my wife's business, and email/hosting for a new venture of my own, I just plunked down the $100 for a GoDaddy business package, clicked a few buttons, and had email and WordPress up and running. Some of that I've since migrated to virtual machines on my cluster, other pieces are still chugging away at GoDaddy.
Now, if you were looking for long-term hosting - be it shared, virtual, or dedicated server - that bears some evaluation of vendors. A lot of people I know swear by pair.com, and rackspace.com is pretty much the leader for dedicated servers, but they're both on the pricey side - probably why a lot folks these days end up starting business on Amazon EC2 virtual machines. (Not Debian, but a unix-based alternative, are a bunch of small outfits that have racks full of Mac Mini's running the server version of OSX - which is essentially BSD Unix with some management utilities added.)
Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra