eDirectHost is one of the many companies which offer websites for people who don’t want to get bogged down in technical details. The particular niche eDirectHost focuses on is ecommerce web design. In particular, they offer many features specific to such sites like: coupons, support for different payment providers, etc. Two other positive aspects are that it is BBB accredited (which should give you some confidence in the way they conduct business) and their pricing is competitive with other solutions like Yahoo! Store.

You are giving up some control when going with such solutions, no question about it, so you should carefully evaluate the tradeoff. One recommendation of mine would be to register the domain name separately (ie. not trough them). This way you retain some amount of control and if you have any problems with them, you can set up a site with an other provider and redirect your domain there.

An other concern might be that they are billing you for services which you could get otherwise for free (ie. website analytics, email, etc), however they seem to be reasonable in this department also (the services which you could get for free are included in all the packages).

Finally, you might wonder if the fact that the number of templates is limited is a disadvantage. Most of the people however, when they are shopping online, don’t mind it and are more concentrated on getting the right product for the right price than how the site looks. The only time looks influences their decision is when they estimate the credibility of the site, and professionally designed templates certainly help there.

Full disclosure: this is a paid review from ReviewMe. Under the terms of the understanding I was not obligated to skew my viewpoint in any way (ie. only post positive facts).