Looking for hosting in East TN (usa) area (new to this)

[python423]

Looking for hosting and domain names in the Eastern United states area. I'm wanting to start an online community. But dont have alot of knowledge of servers,online html and such. I'm generally good with computers tho and think I can learn it farily easily..

I guess what is my first step? to get a place to host the software? to setup a demo so I can play with it? Also I have 20 megs of space allocated ffrom my IP provider? could I run software there temporary until I have a good understanding of it? please advise

[slappy]

One of the first steps to learn is that your hosting company does not need to be that close to you. You are not going to be going over and having an 'in person" chat with their staff and personally visiting "your" server. ;) All these things are usually simply done over the internet, and, because of the relative speed of the net these days, it certainly shouldn't make much "relative" difference where your host might be located, as compared to their pricing, the services they provide and how reliable their customer support may be.

If you want to "test drive" your own copy of vBulletin, you could install it on your "local machine" using a program such as WAMP or XAMP, (free downloads) which will install Apache, MySQL and PHP on your local machine, for you to use and play with.

Regards,

[tms12]

i use hostmonster for 3 of my communities. I worte my personalreview (http://goldseo.com/news/general/webhosting-review-hostmonster-webhosting-company/)as well. When i started i had no idea about hosting companies and more, i learned a within last 8 months. One more great thing i would add on to my review that you can alter/edit you file online. Hosmonster will let you do that. My other hosting companies , i have to download the file and then edit it and then upload it, just plain hassle .

Hoep it helped