[Will]

My sister uses Host Excellence and they're quite cheap at $2.95/month which comes with a few nice tools and 5GB of space and 50GB of bandwidth. Their customer service is also good. When comparing them to other cheap deals I think they come out well.

IX Web Hosting also looks very good, they have a cheaper plan at $3.95/month which gives you 10GB of space and 100GB of bandwidth, and a plan at $6.45/month which gives you 20GB of space and 300GB of bandwidth. I haven't found anything which beats them yet.

Award Space is FREEEE so I use them.

[Baseball_Fan]

1and1.com has hosting for 2.95 a month, with a free domain and a mysql database. But customer servcie sucks. If you need help with anything, they are not helpful. It is cheap and it works. Plus, for a while they are giving away 5 .info domains for free if you buy a service.

[pantone159]

The webhost that I picked (HostGator), and thus my website, was recently the victim of an extremely dangerous hack.

Specifically, from around Thu 21 Sep 2006 to 9 pm CT Fri 22 Sep (when I shut my site down), Internet Explorer visitors were not being fed the correct HTML data, but instead corrupted data that included a link to a malicious website that took advantage of a new [zero-day] IE exploit to crap all over people's machines.

At least one of my visitors, who I had enlisted to confirm that it was the website that had issues (as opposed to my local machine), was infected with viruses, pop-ups, and God knows what else.

I noticed that two visitors came to look at my element photos, early (2-3 am Central USA time) on Thu.  In case those are some people from ChemicalForums, you should be watchful for problems on your machines.  The hack may not have started that early, but I currently do not know.

My stuff is down until I am sure that my pages will be served as I entered them, which might be a while.

This is apparently a problem in the 'cPanel' configuration software on servers.  A flaw allowed someone with access to a local account (either a real account or one hacked into) to root the server, and install malicious web server software.  Although only HostGator is confirmed to have been attacked, other hosts are likely vulnerable to this.

Most of the virus/spyware/who-knows crap seems to be new and not yet detected by most scanners.

Note that there are 3 new exploits involved in this:
1 - New exploit in cPanel on servers allowing root access
2 - New exploit in IE allowing arbitrary code execution
3 - New spyware/viruses that are not yet caught by scanners

Yuck, Yuck, Yuck.

[PixelMage]

Hi there, I'm a new teacher looking for some guidance. I've been tasked with organizing a chemistry contest for students to enter in small groups. That will happen early in September, when the new school year officially starts. The goal is to get them engaged with chemistry in a fun and challenging way. As a young and inexperienced teacher, I could really use some advice on the best platform to host something like this. I want it to be easy to use for both students and teachers. It would also be great if it had built-in templates or options to customize the contest format. My students range from 11 to 14 years old, if that helps target recommendations. I'm open to any and all suggestions you might have! What online tools have you used to run academic contests successfully? Do you have any tips for structuring the contest and writing engaging chemistry problems? Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm excited to organize this event for my students, I just need a nudge in the right direction. Thank you!