web site design/hosting advice needed

Hi, I'm currently in the process of making a website and I need some advice. Currently, I want to have a form in which the user fills out certain values, and have this form send an e-mail to a specific e-mail address containing the results of this form. Currently, I am trying to use the popular FormMail perl script to send the results of the web form to a specific e-mail address. Now, this FormMail script uses the UNIX sendmail command to achieve this result.

My question is, is this the best and easiest way in order to grab results from a form and e-mail them to me? Or is there there other easier/more "portable" ways of doing this (as this method only works for UNIX-based servers supporting sendmail I suppose).

Also, I need advice on hosting. If I end up using the FormMail script, I'll need a server capable of supporting the sendmail command and as far as I'm aware, there aren't any free servers that do this. I'm willing to pay, but when I search the internet for webhosting, lots of services with varying prices come up and I don't know enough to tell which are good and which are bad.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

#262813

perl and sendmail is a pretty common way of doing things as far as I understand. I personally prefer PHP and the mail function because I know very little perl. I also know that the php function mail(); will use whichever mail daemon php was compiled to support. Perl might do this, but not sure. AS for hosting, There'll be someone else here who can point you in the right direction.

#262856

Thanks Ludge, actually your PHP solution seems more portable than my UNIX sendmail solution so I'll investigate that. In the meantime, I hope someone can give me hosting information....

#263551

I highly recommend Burton Hosting (http://burtonhosting.com/). I have used them for 3 or 4 years now, and I haven't had one complaint. I have run the FormMail script and it works. Their technical service is wonderful, and incredibly fast. Their "Personal" hosting option is $5 a month and features 250 mb of space and 5 gb bandwidth. I personally use the "Buisness" option.

Hope this helps.

-kompile15

#263570

if you want Linux hosting, ill recommend...

www.imosted.com <- Fast service / 15gigs bandwidth / 3 gigs of space

#263635

Great, I'm going to take a look at them and see which I'll choose. At least now I won't be stumbling in the dark searching for webhosts.

#263687

@Seph Do you mean imHosted.com?