I've taken a look at what PowerDnn has to offer and I thought I'd ask the community for some feedback. I'd like to run 3 sites off one install - two of them will be fairly flat and are more for personal/family use. The third will be a local parenting community network type site.

I'd like to sell banner ads on the third site, but I noticed that PowerDNN's personal hosting package ($20) uses a shared IP. But then I started wondering how the whole process of selling banner ads would work anyway. How do those of you who sell banner ads physically make the sale? Do you use the "Shop" module? Do you simply list the prices and tell people to contact you and make the sale via paypal? In that case, I wouldn't think a shared IP would matter, right?

I also asked about upgrading to the Business plan if I run out of space or need my own IP. It also has the benefit of allowing you to purchase more database space at $10 a g per month, which I like.  Of course, they tried to upsell me to the Business ($50) plan up front because they said it would be hard to upgrade.

My question is - Is that true? Have you ever successfully upgraded with them? I hate to buy more than I need. At the moment, I'm a work from home mom who hasn't had a contract since March. (I haven't really been looking for one, but the point is, I don't exactly have money burning a hole in my pocket.)

I'd like to use them because they'll install it for me and the install was a PITA on my local box. Like another poster said, I used to think I was a good developer until I ran into DNN, lol. There's something of a learning curve, I do believe.

Thanks in advance.

Tina-

I have three $20 plans with them now and will be adding two or three more in a week or so. When I get enough portals I'll move to a dedicated server. Since I use DNN for business purposes I elected not to use child portals - the main problem with child portals is that if one portal goes down they all go down. I have upgraded my own portals a couple of times - it's fairly easy. Mitchell Sellers has a walk through on how to do it on his site.

For your application I don't see a large problem with using child portals. I would make the community site the parent portal and use child portals for the family sites. I would probably start with a $20 per month plan and upgrade if you need to. The downside to the $20 per month plan is that it only has 1gb of disk space. So it would depend on how many graphics you plan to store/display.

Hope this helps

Greg

Tina-

To give you some kind of idea on disk usage - I have a DNN installation with one parent portal and three child portals. The parent is just a regular website and the children are just sites that I used as demo's. None of these have photo galleries or anything that would use a ton of space. So far I have a total of 46 pages and am using 58.7 mb out of the 1000 mb (1gb) of space allowed. So you might find that the 1gb might be good enough.

I don't think you'll be sorry for going with PowerDnn the support is excellent - just yesterday I ran into a problem that really had nothing to do with PowerDNN - I forgot and left the login info to one of my new sites on my work computer. So I put in a support ticket - on a holiday weekend - and they emailed me the info I needed. It did take them a couple of hours vs. the 15 to 30 minute response I usually get!  

As far as upgrading I thought you were talking about upgrading the DNN version. As far as upgrading hosting plans it is very easy - you call them and they do it all for you!

Greg