I moved the website for an organization I belong to to Web Site Source at the end of September. I selected this company because they offered a good storage space to price ratio.

I am using their basic package, on a one-year contract paid in advance. I have 200MB storage space, unlimited email addresses with SMTP service, 20 mailing lists (we use two of them), password-protected directories and a variety of other services. I am not using any e-commerce services. Our organization is nonprofit.

Very soon after I set up the site there, we found we needed a new home for the mailing lists that go along with our organization, so I started using the "SmartList" option that Web Site Source offers. I also find the SMTP email service very useful, because my home ISP is rather bad about keeping it's email servers running.

Web Site Source's service has been reliable enough that I consider it a good value for the price, and I have no intention of moving elsewhere when my contract is up. The mailing list service, particularly, has turned out to be just what we needed. However, I should warn that they do not live up to their 99.9% uptime guarantee. I have had an outage of more than five hours, once each month (not at a predictable time, either), since I started with Web Site Source. I'm not going to downgrade them too far for that, considering the price ($15.96 a month). But you should be warned that there will be outages, and their technical support will not be terribly forthcoming about it. (After your account is back, they'll tell you that "the problem was solved, and it won't happen again" but they will not tell you why your account was offline for 10 hours. And it *will* happen again. So if 24/7 uptime is important to you, take this into consideration.

The WSS control panel is the easiest to use, and most comprehensive of the three domain hosts I currently deal with.

The mailing lists have proved most serviceable, though I should warn you that it takes a bit of patience and a good deal of trial and error to get them running. The major problem is that WSS doesn't really support the lists technically. You are simply referred to a FAQ on the SMARTLIST website. If you're good at figuring out not-particularly-well-written documentation, you'll get your list or lists going eventually, but this isn't something to be undertaken by a computer newbie. Once you've got them set up, they work well. We are using them to run two discussion lists with about 100 members.

The unlimited email addresses have turned out to be more useful that I would have imagined. Because our storage space is ample, (extra mailboxes take up extra storage space) I've been able to offer free email service to any member of our organization who is having trouble with their ISP's email (something that is sadly become all too common these days). Even with the monthly outages, WSS's email service is generally more reliable than that of many large ISPs, and a LOT more reliable than most free email services (Yahoo, Hotmail).

In short, WSS offers ample storage at reasonable prices, and their control panel makes most features easy to use. On the downside, there have been some outages, and the mailing lists require a fairly high level of technical savvy to set up.

Of the three hosting companies I deal with, WSS, Addr.com and 34sp.com, WSS is by far the best buy for someone who needs ample storage space.



Recommended: Yes

Monthly fees (US$): 15.96
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content