For those of you with your own wbsites....

who do you use to host the site? Do you like them? Did you use their webite crating templates? Good, bad, indifferent opinions needed!

Its time I need to make my own website for my art, and I need to know who is going to offer me the best service and user friendly features for the best price. I don't necessarily want cheapest.... I want best over all value. I want a good host that won't be down all the time, who has good customer service should I need it and an easy to use web creater. Of course, I'd like it ot be affordable! :D

I bought our space from www.powweb.com My website is www.plainolpup.com and so far their service has been awesome. Very cheap and very reliable. They have a great email service, too. (I need to take the time to work on our website!!!)

I use http://www.ipowerweb.com/

The feature I really like is the "Live Chat" for customer service. They have always been more than helpful whenever I've had a question.

I have two websites with them, and our work site is through them. I only used their template for one of the sites since I set it up before I knew HTML. Neither of my sites is really developed a lot, so when I get a chance to develop them I may just go with their templates. They are easy to use and save time in setting the site up.

Guess I am the lucky one here: we get that space on the web for free. It comes with our cable service (=our internet provider)! At first I didn't even know that we could open our own site. Then somebody told me about it, got me started, and.... the rest is history :)

I use our internet provider (phone company). They finally have space available to users. I've used lot of "free" places that turned into "pay" places throughout the years. Our internet provider has been the most stable of all the sites (Homestead, GeoCites,Tripod to name a few off top of my head). I strongly suggest looking into what your internet provider has to offer.

I use Cute Site Builder by Global Scape.
It takes patience at first to learn but once you get the hang of it it's so easy. I love it.

I make my websites from Geocities. it has small pop-ups, but I don't use the web template. I write my HTML mostly. You can see two of my websites at www.wrestlinggirl.net and www.hollywoodjimmy.com .. Both are hosted at geocities free site.

I am currently hosted with http://surpasshosting.com. I bought a reseller from them (a reseller just means that you can host more than one domain with your space). Surpass has been EXCELLENT, the cheapest yet the best customer service I've ever dealt with. I was hosted with Pow Web once as well as the person above me BUT they have lots of restrictions (they restrict the number of pop3 emails you can have, subdomains, FTP accounts, etc) and I like having the freedom without restrictions. I LOVE Surpass because I pay $10/month for my 3GB reseller, AND they host your main account FOR FREE, so really I'm getting 6GB of space for $10/month :)

Also I do NOT use templates, I code entirely by hand. I don't use any programs either, I code by memory. I use windows notepad to code. I code valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS :)

EDIT: I just wanted to add, about Surpass -- when I switched from my old host provider (who I AM NOT happy with..) I was hosting my own domain PLUS five other domains on my reseller. Surpass moved EVERY ONE of my files over to my new account with them AND restored ALL of the other domains I Was hosting as well. Not to mention we ran into a LOT of problems and they fixed every one of them within an hour. They are amazing and so fast to reply and willing to work with you and your problems. I don't think I will be switching to ANY host any time soon.

I use 2CoolWeb, and my sites are www.caicos.org and www.alightech.com

I use http://www.ipower.com and I love the service and the email!

I use dreamhost which I recommend 100%! They are so friendly and helpful! And their control panel is so easy to use.

It's not the cheapest out there, but you get what you pay for. I use a TON of bandwidth, and they are the best I could find for a larger site. I code my own site, I don't use templates.

I used to use ipowerweb. They were okay while I was hosting with them, but when I canceled it took forever for them to refund my money, and even then they cheated me out of like $20. :( I wrote back a couple of times and they never replied.

I use F5 Hosting for server space. I use Dreamweaver to create my own pages and upload them to my server via Cute FTP.

F5 Hosting is really great. They answer my questions the same day and have been very helpful.