I could use some help with my website.

[Steve knight]

I had upgraded my host when I was going to get a new site. but the new site never happened. i want to change hosts but I don't know what I need in a new host. will my site work on a apache server?

[Jim Becker]

Unless your site is coded with something specific to another server environment (such as Microsoft), it should run fine on Apache. There may or may not be a little minor tweaking required, depending on what technologies are used, once you move it to a different environment.

[Chris Lindell]

I'll echo what Jim said, as long as your site's not using ASP, you should be just fine. Good web host that I've used but have no vested interest in is LiquidWeb. Great uptime, all Linux based, free MySQL, all sorts of goodies.

[Steve knight]

I wanted to change hosts because 1 email had gotten very slow. sometimes it would take a hour to get a file. that I think could be fixed but I wanted a email server that would push email to my iphone so I went with a host that uses kerio email server. Plus I wanted better spam filtering. I have not seen a spam since changing and I get emails instantly. I don't know if I was using asp or was going to it with a new webpage that did not happen. my page is about 4 years old. I can send the link in a private message.

[Eric DeSilva]

I've got an email account that I use for various on line things--tends to get a lot of spam. Didn't bother me when I was using Outlook to read it, since outlook filtered a lot out. However, when I set up my iPhone, it had no filter and the spam was a serious headache...

Here's a trick I found. Get a gmail account. Gmail accounts can be set to retrieve mail from other POP server accounts, so set your gmail to retrieve the mail from the real account. Set up your iPhone to get mail from gmail, since gmail actually filters... voila, no more spam!

Since that email acct is essentially read-only, I haven't investigated whether you can tweak gmail to show originating mail as coming from the other account or whether "replies" will be from gmail. That might be an issue for some folks.

[Steve knight]

gmail does a pretty good job. but that would make things even slower. now I get email instantly and it costs about 4.00 over what I was paying. plus it seems it does not eat my batteries. the battery seems to last as long or a bit longer then when I was getting email every 15 minutes.

[Frank Hagan]

Since that email acct is essentially read-only, I haven't investigated whether you can tweak gmail to show originating mail as coming from the other account or whether "replies" will be from gmail. That might be an issue for some folks.

Gmail will send the message from whatever email address the original is addressed to ... I have several email addresses all routed through my Gmail account.

You do sometimes run into a spam filter that doesn't like the reply-to header being different from the actual sender header (part of the email that you don't normally see), so its not perfect. But it works well enough for me that I went from several hundred spam messages per day to none.

Steve, send me a link to your site at fshagan_AT_gmail.com (replacing _AT_ with @, of course) and I can tell you what server its on, and what type of server you can move it to, etc. Often you can have the web host do the move for you if both old and new hosts are using the same control panel software (ie., Cpanel, Plesk, etc.) There are several hosts out there that are good and many that are bad. I highly recommend my current host, but only for people who know what they are doing (there is no hand-holding, but they have been rock solid over the past five years for me for all my sites.)