Do You Have Your Own Website?

I have been toying with the idea of having my own website, but I dont know how to get started really. I need to get a domain name and I need a host, but who and where?

I have had a geocities site in the past and it was easy enough to add to the site with the tools they provide, but its far from ideal. I want a host that has tools to make editing the site fairly easy since I am real savvy with html and all.

I have a blog address, but thats not really what I am looking for.

I think 50gb of space is all I would ever need, thats probably more than I would need actually. The site has to allow traffic to download pics with no stupidily low daily useage cap. I primarily want a site where I can post my digital photos for others to see and download easily so I dont have to transfer them via msn messenger and the like. I like the coppermine photo pages I have seen. Just a basic personal site with internal links to different things I am interested in. I dont want to rule the world, I just want a little space on the web where I can tell friends to go to see my stuff.

Any advice you have to get be started would be appreciated. Stories of good and bad experiences with getting your site started would be interesting. Feel free to link your site in your reply if you want too. Thanks again, looking forward to replies.

I use globat.com for fireballtrailers.com

I get 80 gigs/month for under $10. Great for static hosting large files.

I have used midPhase, a hosting company. They are quite good. Great control panel to configure your site, lots of built-in scripts & programs, very affordable, and great tech support. http://www.midphase.com/

Hey Driftwood,

I use Midphase too. Very Happy with them.

-tito

Hi, Tito.

I used to run a web company that provided hosting as well as design services. But providing hosting is a pain - so I don't do that any more

My personal recommendation is http://www.lamphost.com/

Loki, I can recommend some affordable -- free, actually -- places to you. They are a bit flaky at times due to their gratuis nature, but I'm thankful for places like this.


IMAGE HOSTING
http://www.photobucket.com
http://www.imageshack.us

I use both Photobucket and ImageShack to host the pictars on my website. The latter is nice in that it has a good way of autogenerating whole thumbnail preview list code for you, but you can't upload batch images until you upgrade to a premium account. Photobucket allows you to upload batch, but the code it generates is for the full images. Try and see.

You can tie this in with...

FREE WEB HOSTING
http://www.sitesled.com


It's a bit slow but they're persistent and continue to improve. They have pretty high bandwidth limits (30GB/month I *think*, it should say on their site) and 100MB of disk space compared to other "free" providers.

But if you get any more serious over time, I'd have to suggest too that you pay a low monthly fee and go for a rock-solid webhosting option.

I hear some in SL are excited about DreamHost -- http://www.dreamhost.com/

http://www.flickr.com/ seems to be a popular one for photos, you don't get your own domain name, but its free and seems to work for alot of people.

No experience myself with it.

Lisse, I agree, hosting is the one thing that is completely out of your control.

I recommend DirectNIC, they have a simple plan for a domain and hosting for $30/year. It's only 20MB, but you might be able to get by with that. Look at some other domain registrars (GoDaddy, etc.) who offer similar plans. The benefit is you get everything from one company. It's pretty low-frills hosting, but it doesn't sound like you need much anyway.

I use www.1and1.com and in fact just got our corporate site switched to them last week as well!

I think the latest home package (TRUST ME you won't need more than this unless you are storing a $hitload of MP3's up there or something!) pricing is $6.99/month for 1GB storage, 200 email addresses and a whole bunch of other stuff... when I signed on for the home package it was $4.99/month and 50MB/50emails, so they are expanding quite a bit it seems!

Good luck!
Arti

You get 80 gigs of transfer per month - not 80 gigs of storage space for files - big difference. For most web sites, you don't need more than about 50-100 megs of storage unless you are hosting large files. It is the transfer rate that can get you - SLUniverse has maxed its out several times.

Loki, it also depends on if you want to do anything dynamic with ASP/PHP/.NET, or if you just want a standard web site. Dreamweaver and FrontPage are both excellent third party web site editors and management tools, though neither is cheap. There are some less full featured ones as well.

Hosting companies abound - it truly depends on your needs. I use discountasp.net for SLUniverse, which is an excellent host if you are doing advanced web applications and your own development, but overkill for a standard site.

There are places that will give you space for free if you have themed content in-line with the rest of their site. YMMV of course, but I got my space, FluffAndSuch.com, from a site who's operator liked my puppetry videos and heard that I needed a place to put them up for download.

Flickr is a nice free image organizing service which gives you up to 10MB worth of uploads per month (you can get more with a subscription), and even has a second life group:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/secondlife

http://www.dreamhost.com is offering a nice deal at the moment, under US$10 for one year of web hosting. This is an exceptional deal, as you also get a shell account. If you plan to do RPC/email scripting in SL, you may want to check this out.

Edit: This deal seems to be over as of today. They are still a well-recommended hosting provider though.

If you really want to go all out though, you can get a nice virtual dedicated host at http://www.johncompanies.com. You get a "virtual" machine, with full root access to do pretty much install and configure whatever you want for $75/month (4GB storage and 40GB/month transfer). I just bought one from them, but it's probably outside the scope of what most people are looking for.

For more moderate webhosting needs, I've had a great experience with http://www.lunarpages.com though I've seen somewhat better deals around for storage/bandwidth (perhaps at a cost of lesser service). They offer 1000MB/40GB for under $10/month.

You might have some difficulty finding 50GB storage space, most web hosts are in the 1-5GB storage range with the basic packages, and charge 1-3 more dollars per month per extra GB.

hostfor2bucks.com $24/year domain included 50mb storage/1gb bandwidth
FrontPage extensions, PHP?MySql, Apache, ASP .NET 10 pop emails blah blah
Nice easy CP, FTP access.

Thanks for all your responses, I appreciate it.

I think I am going to go with 1&1. Its not the cheapest, but it looks like a lot of value for the price and the good words about quality of customer service helped. Now, the hard part is coming up with a domain name. It needs to be easy to spell and remember and not to specific or generic. Anyway, thanks again for your suggestions.

You probably have 10 megs or so with your ISP account.