Website providers

[The Mantis]

I'll be bumping into my young niece on xmas day and I've just remembered she asked me 3 months ago how she could get a website for her hairdressing/beauty business. I don't think she wants very much, just a presence on the web.

I've been through a few things in the past, using freenetname and madasafish and so on, building web pages from scratch and uploading them, but I'm way out of touch now. I'm not keen to get involved except maybe taking a couple of photos, so is there anything out there she can get which is just templates she can update herself? I see her email is btconnect and I see BT offer hosting at ?5/month but any other advice?

[Scotty]

bottom line - you get what you pay for ...... I would not tie myself to BT or anyone else unless I had to. For the same amount of money or maybe a little more you can have more control over your domain/hosting. As for software that she can update, there are loads to choose from ... and the ones I am quoting are free .... Our software of choice is Wordpress (which we use for CTO main site) or Joomla (which we used to use for main site and have now employed on the shop site for the club). Both have a learning curve, but both can be used to great effect for a business site. We have also hand-coded a few sites for clients who didnt want or need to go the whole hog.

Domain names tend to be ?10 or $10 per year (some are more, some less). We tend to buy most of ours via GoDaddy as they have proved reliable over a number of years and we have full control over the nameservers to point them wherever we want or to host them where we want. We also buy them in the USA rather than UK as we get the roughly same price in USD$ as we do in GBP? and with the exchange rate it saves a few pennies.

For hosting, there are three options realistically. Free, Shared, or VPS/Dedicated.

Free hosting tends to be a bit of a minefield, especially for a business as you are sometimes stuck with set formats and almost guaranteed to have to display ads you have no desire for nor control over. As an example, CTO was on this type of hosting back in 1995/96 or thereabouts (Freeserve)

Shared hosting is what most of the world is on and can be got for as little as ?5 per month. You 'share' your server with tens, hundreds or even thousands of other users. For most people this is adequate enough and from what you describe would certainly fit the bill. You normally have full control over your hosting (but not the actual server), you can host multiple websites on your plan and it may also have other features available. We can certainly point you to a company or two if this is what you want. We may even be able to get you a bit of a discount. The downside of shared hosting is that it is usually oversold so the machines can be sluggish or even go down frequently, you are also at the mercy of the other people on the server. If someone is doing something nefarious, then its possible your website could be flagged as dangerous or as a spammer based on the actions of others. This is the type of hosting that CTO used to be on from about 2003 until the beginning of November.

VPS or Dedicated hosting is the heavy duty hosting where you not only have control over your hosting plan, but also control over the server itself. Dedicated is usually a machine to yourself (and uber expensive), but VPS is more affordable as you do share the machine with others (maybe 10 rather than hundreds) but each portion 'owned' by one person is setup as its own 'virtual machine'. You control your own virtual machine and you have access to a specified amount of RAM, processor power etc. This is what we moved to last month and the difference between what we had and what we now have is huge. Downside is that it costs maybe 10X as much as shared hosting.

This has been a free lesson brought to you by InTorNetDesign.com ;)

[Scotty]

Sorry Mantis - forgot to add

InTorNetDesign.com (ie. myself and Don) can also host the domain for you if required but we are currently too busy with other projects to help much on the actual design. Send a PM to myself and Don for more info if required.

[TinRoofMan]

You could get her to try GBBO

I have done a couple for people - you get proper domain names & is totally free for 2 years..

[CaleyD]

Be very careful about any sites offering up something for "free". One of the biggest issues, as Scotty already highlighted, is that they tend to offer templates for you to build your site around....and most of those templates are not up to the task for a variety of reasons......

1. Many of them are ugly and don't have enough flexibility for you to get a site looking anything like what you may want.

2. They don't perform well on search engines, or allow you sufficient access to make them perform well.

3. Register your domain with them "for free", encounter any issues and want to move and you'll quickly run into problems getting your domain to take with you. Many will, quite rightly, look for the registration cost back...many will also slap you with an administration fee.

Always, Always, Always register your domain through an independent and well known registrar. That way, regardless of whatever else happens, you can always just point it elsewhere and move on.