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website hosting reccomendations?

kyeakel

Experienced Member
Joined
Jul 27, 2009
Messages
491
Location
Curwensville, PA
I'd like to have a website where I can post my vintage computer collection, projects I'm working on, and other hobby related info. I've never done a website before. I know many of you have websites, and would like to know if you'd recommend one. I've searched online, only to get more confused, the review sites seem to be spam, interested in affiliate fees and not what might be the best choice.

My criteria would be: beginner support or so easy that it's not needed, reasonable cost < $8 per month, easy to use tools to maintain the pages, file download support, email, and whatever I don't know enough to be concerned about.

I don't need forums, or e-Commerce.

Thanks for your suggestions,
Kipp
 
These days many web sites are edited on hosted on the server using Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress (or even SharePoint). So the pages only exists as data in a database, when you access a page a script runs.

So for example if you go to www.smrcc.org.uk (South Manchester Radio Club) the tabs you see don't exist as files on the server. Its a Drupal Server and you just edit them on the server.

Perhaps I should setup some Vintage Sites for folks...
.. some places here will run you a Drupal Site for the amount you envisage

https://drupal.org/hosting
 
Have you checked if your internet provider already allows for a hosted personal web site? Usually they're limited to a fairly small amount of data but still a decent building block although you may need to learn some simple HTML editing tools (I'm no longer up to date on what's popular out there). As Dave said though, a lot of time CMS (Content Management Systems) like Drupal are common as an easyish to setup and modify objects and reduce the need to know the code.
 
I have roadrunner, and a few years ago they stopped personal websites. I did an online HTML class today, seems simple enough for the text and images. I assume there must be links to setup to get ftp like services.

Kipp
 
Do yourself a favor and avoid EIG owned hosts. They are horrible. Also avoid any suggestions from "Top 10 Hosts" sites on the internet. Most of the hosts on the lists paid to be there or are run by someone wanting affiliate kickbacks. I can say from personal experience that GoDaddy and 1&1 are horrible to deal with too. 1&1 seems incapable of properly billing people.
 
I have an antirecommendation: godaddy. When my current service with them is about to expire, I'm moving. To where? Don't know yet.

I've had billing problems, mysql problems and sometimes it times out trying to get a scp connection going. Once its up, the transfer is pretty zippy and doesn't drop, but starting the transfer is unreliable. Maybe the transfers are OK because they limit the number of people connecting at once? But in any case, they have way to many sites crammed onto each server. When I first signed up with them I thought it was great. I went almost a year with no trouble. It seems to have slowly started degrading. They probably didn't touch the hardware and just increased the # of sites per host or something cheap like that.

There is one nice thing I have to say about them: I did set up a wordpress for my wife on godaddy, and that actually went very smoothly. I pretty much just clicked a button and it installed itself perfectly.
 
Like barythrin suggests, check out if your ISP already gives you web space. That used to be very common. The other "no brainer" is to just sign up for Wordpress.com site - that's a total of two clicks as I recall. WP is easy to administer and doesn't require any knowledge of html or php, and has lots of great themes. From my perspective if one is going to use templates, then why not just let someone like that set it up for you. I've got a couple there. This one, VOXIGO, is supposed to be for vintage and computer stuff, but I haven't been maintaining it.

If you want to learn to write web sites, I'd recommend for someone like you with a technical bent to set up a LAMP server at home. That way you can learn all about what a server requires and see what is actually going on when you use the internet. Of course you can also just put apache2 (or whatever you like) on your desktop, but then you don't get the flavour of ftping along with it.

For hosting recommendations, I highly recommend Superb Internet. I've used them for some years now, and am still impressed that their knowledgeable techs will get back to you in just a few minutes every time. They have some very cheap accounts as well. For $5 you can get a lot of space and traffic allowance, and 5 MySQL dabases so you can do forums and blogs too. I've never tried their software, preferring to write sites from scratch, but I think they've got all the regular stuff that some people like to use for canned sites, I notice they also have a built-in Wordpress app, so you don't have to upload your own. Ya, I sound like I'm selling, but I've had quite a few years of excellent service from them. I'm sure there are others that offer the same.
 
Another option albeit there's some minor mentions of "soul" and ownership in the EULA but Google also has a free website hosting thing that I haven't played with. I wouldn't necessarily worry too much if you're just starting out though about quality. You have your site on your home system and you just sync it with their site when you do updates. If you're not needing it to be 24/7 and 99.9% uptime anyone should be fine starting out to get your feet wet. Most of the free services have you limited to 100MB of storage and you can pay to up that. I *think* my friend uses ipower for his site and has been happy (it's pretty ridiculously cheap for a shared server) plus has easy to use control panel applet to manage the site and install features you'd like. I'm not sure if you can really install drupal or a CMS but I recall they did support php and other common scripting.

As a business we didn't like ipower very much but that was us paying for a dedicated server. They seemed to bounce it once and a while without telling us so they could go in and apply updates or reset our root password. It wasn't very professional from our experience but they were cheap and we were a start-up so we worked with it best we could until we could afford better. For any hobbyist site though it's all relative to how much you want to know and do and any free service will help you see what's involved and how much space things may take for future contracts.
 
I didn't know about the google sites, I think this is the way to go. The cost is certainly easy to take. I'll try this as a way to get an understanding of what is involved.

Thank you all!
Kipp
 
As a business we didn't like ipower very much but that was us paying for a dedicated server. They seemed to bounce it once and a while without telling us so they could go in and apply updates or reset our root password. It wasn't very professional from our experience but they were cheap and we were a start-up so we worked with it best we could until we could afford better. For any hobbyist site though it's all relative to how much you want to know and do and any free service will help you see what's involved and how much space things may take for future contracts.

iPower is an EIG brand, I'm not surprised.

My last project I landed up using StableHost. Standard cPanel interface and never had a problem with them. They are not "unlimited", but that is a good thing as that means they aren't overselling their shared servers.
 
. . . I'm not sure if you can really install drupal or a CMS but I recall they did support php and other common scripting.
I think all servers support php these days - though it is not hard to do without and just do a static page. I have a feeling that the killer on free hosting would be lack of MySQL support though - so no CMS.

As for Google sites, that probably works just fine if you don't mind playing by their rules. (I wouldn't) Checking around I found this site which gives examples of Google Sites sites. One thing which I see there is extremely long URLs. Often we use clickable links these days, but it is a bit of a downer if you can't easily write it down or otherwise tell someone how to get to your site. Wordpress is fairly simple, like "you.wordpress.com", which is not bad for a free site. I imagine that Google will let you use your own domain name though, if you want to get one. Of course you can always pay for a redirect service too.
 
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