Hi guys, I know quite a few of you run websites so it seams a good place to ask!

I have a mate who runs about 75 websites, none of which generate any income. He's been hosting on DirectNic who've recently done away with their free hosting options and he's now in a tight situation with hundreds of pounds worth of renewals suddenly due out of nowhere.

I recommended using 000Webhosts who I use, but they're not being cooperative with their free option and their paid for option is expensive.

If he keeps the domains registered with DirectNic for about $5 a year each, he'll need someone who provides:

• Name servers
• Email forwarding to Gmail
• Web space with very basic php for web forms
• Quite low traffic requirements, but obviously "unlimited" would be good

So far I'm struggling to find anyone that even offers bulk entries in definitive name servers at a reasonable price. It's not easy to Google because a search just comes back with free DNS servers like OpenDNS and Google which isn't what I want!

I do have access to a Windows 2K server in a hosting centre so theoretically I could set it up myself, but I'm worried if I do it wrong then the DNS traffic could swamp my bandwidth.

Can someone recommend a way forward? I'm thinking of a very cheap shared server somewhere, but I don't really have a scooby where to start...

Thank you!

I'm not sure what you're expecting, or what options are out there, but I have a reseller account with heart Internet that's about £35 a month. I don't even know if that's good value or not, but I'd happily recommend it.

Specifically I was thinking of something like one of these: http://www.lowendbox.com/

The spec is good enough to run hundreds of simple low-traffic websites, and prices around €5 a month.

I expect I could set them up with Apache, but it would mean doing my own name servers which is where I get a bit worried. There used to be some free name servers available, but EveryDNS has sold out to DynDNS and the others I can find only permit a single domain per user.

I'll do some more reading.

OK the good news, DirectNic now seem to offer "basic DNS" for free which actually covers his needs. I was looking at Dyn but they're very expensive.

So I've pretty much decided to get a low end box and just stick LAMP on it. I've got it running on my server for now, so we can trial a few domains until I decide which of the thousand suppliers to choose from. Any recommendations at all anyone? Budget is about £5pcm for maybe 50GB space and not huge amounts of bandwidth.