Mike Snow or other IT People

[Christopher Laurencio]

Can you steer me in the right direction regarding setting up a website, are there free hosts I can use? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I do not have a clue on how to get started.



Thanks in advance



Chris

 

[Michael Snow]

Depends on what you want the site to do. The free ones all have ads and such on them. However, there are lots of hosts out there for $5/month that are a very decent deal for a simple site (no shopping cart, etc). They don't do the site maintenance, just a place to store your site.



Godaddy.com is who I use as my registrar. They seem to be the cheapest or very close.



For $5 per month, you're getting space on a desktop class machine, NOT a server with redundant power supplies, drives, ECC memory, etc. I've had my server for a good 6 months and haven't had any hardware issues.



wgkish on here runs his own business, he might be able to give you better info. I just run my own server and a few sites. I don't resell because it just ain't worth it.

 

[Christopher Laurencio]

Mike, It will probably be a site for fishing and possibly a club website, something I have been thinking of doing. I see a lot of people use Tripod, but it has a zillion pop-ups. Should I just use Comcast, I believe they offer a free webpage for me as a subscriber but who knows how much space you actually get.



Once I pick a provider and get it going do you design the pages as you would in MS Powerpoint?



Thanks

 

[Greg Meyer]

Another approach, like Tripod, is at Yahoo. They host the site and have "tools", actually templates that you "fill in the blanks" to create the web page. I have had a number of small companies use the service to get a web presence. Most are happy, or have moved on to a professionally created web page for increased functionality. Yahoo gives you the usual mail forwarding and comments sections.

 

[Rich D]

Chris,



There are some inexpensive programs out there that will let up easily build a website. I use one by the "Complete Idiot's guide" people to set up the shell, then go in and modify the html.



Rich D

 

[TrepMan]

Chris - I use Yahoo Geocities for my home page, it's free and there are no pop ups just some small adds on the corners of the screens. You just need a Yahoo mail account. Like Tripod Geocities has the tools, templates and different layers to build on all for free. Just a thought.



Here is mine...
http://www.geocities.com/mstrepper/index.html

 

[Jim B]

Chris also check out lunarpages.com they have a good amount of space for a good price and they are also fast. I have been using tripod for my clubs site and whilke its ok it is slow, i pay the monthy fee so theres no popups but im going to switch it to lunarpages in the next week or two. Lunar offers 5 times the space for the same cash.

 

[C C]

I would agree with Mike on purchasing a domain through GoDaddy. You can host it on a Free no popup host like Doteasy. No transfer fee and you wouldn't get hit up with a Domain renewal fee from them. If you buy the site through Doteasy their renewal fee is $25. but the hosting remains free. You get 20mb space and allot of free tools that can help you with building a site. The site will remain free unless you go over the traffic usage or space limits, it's pretty hard to do for a personal site, they don't host adult content sites. I have used them for hosting various web sites for 3 years and am happy with them for small sites. I use Lunarpages for larger sites. I would not recommend PowerPoint to build a website, it creates way to many pages and large files that are unnecessary. If you don't have access to MS. FrontPage try MS Word, it's the next easiest to use. But I would suggest trying what ever online tools Doteasy or the Host you select to build your pages.



Just a hint on site building, try to use folders and categorize your content and don't just dump everything into one folder. It make managing the site easier for you and the next person that may end up managing it.



Good Luck!



Cass

 

[Roy Cody]

I set up a site for my club a few years ago on "Homestead.com". They were free when I first started, however they started charging after the first year. After a few years, my club chose not to pay the fees anymore. I now just use the available space that comcast offers me to create a simple site to get basic info like YTD standings, Tournament results, etc, out to our members.



I believe comcast gives you 25 mb of space.



RoyC




http://home.comcast.net/~roy.cody/wsb/index.html

 

[Christopher Laurencio]

Thanks Everybody, I will let you know when I get it up and running, probably as soon as fishing ends for the season.

 

[Christopher Laurencio]

Trep, your page is down.

 

[David Munaretto]

I use innovative hosting for my web site - it costs me $2.80 / month for 500 megs space and no advertising. And it is a server class machine, running all the open source applications you can think of. I have PHP nuke running for my site, which is a portal system and content management system. Easy to run. You hit install and your site is up & running - you can see mine at:



www.munaretto.net/start



Innovative Hosting URL is www.innovative-hosting.net



David

 

[Christopher Laurencio]

Dave, do I need my own equipment for that? Or is everything on a server somewhere else.

 

[Michael Snow]

Dave, when I say desktop class machine, I'm talking that level of hardware. Server level hardware is a completely different animal.



Server-level hardware means redundant power supplies, scsi cards, RAID5 at a minimum, error correcting RAM that will block a bad section off but still run.



CJL, when you buy a hosting acct, you're buying disk space and bandwidth. They oversell capacity because if your acct has 100megs of disk space and 1gb of bandwidth per month, they fully expect that you'll never use all 100m or all 1g of bandwidth and if you do go over, they'll usually put the hurt on you with the next bill. It's your job to supply all of the content (pages). Their server simply holds the data and responds to requests for it.



One other thing that I failed to mention. I think Rich Stern also provides hosting services.

 

[Christopher Laurencio]

Thanks Mike

 

[David Munaretto]

CJL - you don't have to buy anything it is a service --



david

 

[Christopher Laurencio]

Maybe I can get something from my current employer AT&T, I wonder if they sell hosting to consumers?

 

[Texas Transplant]

For what it's worth, I've been using lunarpages.com as my host. Good price for lot's of bell's and whistles - if you pay for a year in advance. I used a simple toolset originally, and have now switched to FrontPage for several reasons.



It cost me about $100.00 for the registration, and then for 1 year of hosting service.



Tex

 

[Tony Payne]

What Mike just mentioned is a key point...



Just like cell phones... they'll murder you on the fine print and overage charges.



Most ISPs offer some level of hosting service with their accounts.



If you have a cable modem or a DSL link, you can host it yourself, but you need to be a little more savvy on setup and security.

 

[Bill Kish2]

I own and operate a medium size web hosting company. I would be more than happy to donate some accounts to members here at nitroowners.com



Drop me a email and I will set things up for you.

 

[Christopher Laurencio]

Bill, Email is on the way.



Chris