Website advice

A

AndRob0

Hey all,

I would imagine that a lot of you have your own websites with your bios, work you've done, etc.

Well I've never done my own website and need some advice about it. What are some good companies for domains and hosting? Should I use the same company for both? Also, should I go for something that I can download a template for now and then customize it more as I go along and get more experience?

I've done some research on the subject and kind of know what I should look for in companies, but there are sooooo manyyyyy it's hard to decide. What companies do you use for your hosting, etc. Does anyone use these web packages like the one I found here (http://website.1and1.com/make-your-own-website) you can get personal or professional packages with them.

Sorry to ask so many questions about this. There is just so much out there I just need to know where to even get started.

Cheers
 
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There are some bad stories out there about go daddy so I'd advise staying away from them.

Amazon is popular for hosting these days but it's a complex pricing scheme that scares some users away.
 
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sfoster said:
There are some bad stories out there about go daddy so I'd advise staying away from them.

Amazon is popular for hosting these days but it's a complex pricing scheme that scares some users away.
Click to expand...

Okay.... yea there are bad stories out there about almost ALL the domain companies... the fact is, I've never actually met any of these people who had a problem with GoDaddy.com. In fact I've been using them for years and they by far are the best I've used. EuroDNS on the other hand has given me hell and took beyond ages when I asked them to transfer my domain to GoDaddy.

I HIGHLY recommend GoDaddy, they're friendly, fast, and helpful. Plus you can't forget the great prices you can get if you time your purchase right, find a coupon online, and order about 2+years.

Hosting however I believe isn't as huge. GoDaddy has great hosting packages, but Amazon has better. Now let me say that I don't have a website (yet) for my cinematography... but I do own a game design studio that has a website. I know, just as I will with my film site, that I won't be getting large numbers of visitors in a close period of time. So I don't NEED a huge bandwidth. Therefore I decided to get a free host.

Free hosts are kind of sketchy though... most of them simply give you a subdomain option like Wix or Weebly these are annoying. It took forever to find but Zymic.com gives 6GB Disk Space & 50GB Bandwidth for free. 5 PHP/MYSQL Databases, FTP File Management, Ad-Free, and you don't have to upgrade to point nameservers for your domain address.

Is Zymic perfect? No! It's a free host, I can guarantee you will not have a 99.9% uptime. Do you need it though, honestly? It's more like a 80% uptime and I certainly can live with that for free hosting that fits my needs perfectly.
 
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I use hostgator and I'm pleased with it. However, I'm more of an 'intermediate' user, a total newbie might be overwhelmed by their control panel.

As for design, if we're talking a simple portfolio style site, you really shouldn't need to pay a big professional company. There are lots of free (or cheap) templates out there that you can install, as well as countless tutorials on youtube on how to set things up.
 
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I agree with Sky in regards to Go Daddy, with a caveat. Their domain registration is good. I have no issue with them at all. Their cheap shared hosting is also good, though I moved away from them a long time back (they may have changed since, but their shared servers were configured so mysql/php wasn't fully enabled, no there were things that just wouldn't work without documentation and their staff are mostly clueless about the restrictions).

I have no hesitation in suggesting to use them for domain registration, though keep the hosting separate. Learn how to move your site so you can take advantages of better packages and deals that get offered from around the place.

For instance, I found this one a while back. https://www.digitalocean.com/

SSD hosting for small sites ($5 a month) on a cloud server (that you can park if you don't need) and start it up again. While I don't think it'll suit high end sites, it's decent starting point with decent performance.
 
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Nooo!!!!! Stay as far from 1&1 as you possibly can. And then get farther. And farther.

I've been an unfortunate customer of theirs for nearly a decade, mostly because I was foolish enough to sign up for everything I needed with them and nothing has ever aligned correctly to allow me to get off their service.

Their customer service is atrociously bad, any email you register on one of their domains gets incredible spam (I get about 25 emails a day of spam) and their control panels and functions are incredibly clunky.

This year I've been slowly moving each of my domains and services over to GoDaddy whenever things pop up for renewal. 1&1 has just made it so difficult for me to do so in the past without my website crashing for a month and losing my emails and whatnot.

My relationship with 1&1 is less customer/company as it is hostage/hostage-taker.

Oh, and to answer some of your questions:

1. Yeah, using a domain registrar that can allow you to build your website as well is certainly more convenient, but it may cut you off from some decent website builders. I build my websites in Adobe Muse, and then they are unfortunately hosted on 1&1, which I'm switching this July to GoDaddy. However, if I wasn't using this concoction, I'd probably use a builder like Wix or Squarespace, both of their builders have gotten very impressive in recent years, especially Squarespace.

Those two builders could suit you in terms of getting a template and building around it for your first time - I'd seriously consider Squarespace. I've seen some websites built in that purely based on their templates that made me drool! I'd totally use them if 1) I wasn't using Muse, or 2) it was a bit more advanced. Muse allows me to do some more advanced functions in regards to hosting all of my music that is a necessity for me.

Here's my site, if it helps: http://brettstewart.net/
 
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Whoa! I was expecting maybe one or two responses, but this is great.

Thanks for all the info. A lot of the companies you've mentioned I have been looking at, but it's just hard to know at first what's good and what you can trust. Sorry to hear that some of you have been shafted by some companies. I'm glad I asked first.

I'll dig a bit deeper with some of the companies you guys wrote here and see what I can manage and what I like. Thanks for all the ideas.
 
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