I want your opinion please...

[lilaim]

I'm new here, just found this place yesterday. Anyway, I'm in the process of opening a small home-based business. I want to do mostly wholesale, but will get into resale to.

Now, before I sink a ton of money into a domain, monthly hosting fees, along with all the other expenses, I want to start out with free hosting.

Hopefully, someone will help me with this part. I've been looking at bizland.com, 20m.com, brinkster.com, dreamwater.com...I think that's all. I do honestly hate those pop up banners!! I still have no idea what to do about the shopping cart issue. I thought about using pay pal in the beginning, I just haven't decided. I've checked out mals-e.com, but don't know about it.

Anyone have an input on any on these sites?

Thanks so much!!

 

[ashben]

Paid hosting all the way! Free hosting just might bring a lot of problems (like : bandwidth, SP ads, features etc) for your business idea.

 

[Christy]

I don't have an online business, so I haven't tried these and I don't know how reliable they are, but Hypermart and NetFirms are for business websites

 

[lilaim]

Thanks, I'll check those ones out too. I just don't know if I'm ready to take the leap for my own domain just yet.

Thanks!

 

[Chicken]

Instabill.com and revecom.com have free shopping carts and cc processing service you can use. (See their site for more details).

 

[Nick]

Hypermart Good!

Forget netfirms, thier banner will make you look very unprofessional(sp?). HyperMart is probally the best considering you could run a shopping cart with CGI (I think they have a shoppin cart alternative to free hosting if CGI isn't your thing) and they have secure server (https), so your visitors will not have to worry about CC numbers going to the wrong person.

 

[Chicken]

Nick, if this person doesn't have anything to link the cart to though it won't help him. Neither will secure server access. Sure you can get the numbers securely, but then you have to process them. You'll need a merchant account (which you can often get cart software with it).

If he's looking for an easy solution (temporary even), then something like instabill will be a good choice, as it offers the cart and the processing. it isn't a very great solution (many bad things about 3rd part billers in general - checks mailed only 2x a month, holdback and trans fees much higher than a merch. account), but...