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I did a search on this forum and didn't find much, so forgive me if I'm posting in the wrong place. My husband has a small business and we would like to create a website for it. I have basic web building and html skills from ~15 years ago and I'm looking forward to refreshing them.
My main question would be recommendations for web host sites for a domain name. Godaddy versus Ipage for example..
Any opinions/ advice?
If it makes any difference, there are two available domain names we would be buying.
1. Buy your domains from a different company than you get your hosting from. There's almost no reason to have them together, and lots of reasons to keep them separate (most revolve around protecting yourself from losing everything).
2. Avoid using any kind of built in "site builder" provided by a host. These things generally build poorly constructed sites that are locked into the particular host's servers and programs and can't be easily moved to a new host later.
3. Unless the site is going to be very static, there's almost no reason to write it in raw HTML. There are too many good tools that will allow you to build a very nice site with lots of advanced functions for free. You can always customize the look and feel via themes if you can't find what you need.
Wordpress is one good tool (wordpress.org, not wordpress.com). It's a blog platform, but can act as a nice CMS for business sites, and there are a ton of plugins available to customize it.
There are a number of other CMS's available: Joomla, Drupal, etc, and most hosts will have auto installers that will install them in one button push. This will allow you to install one, play around with it, and delete it if you don't like it.
As for hosting, Go Daddy is OK, but their control panels are fairly clunky, and they are really bad about trying to upsell you anything that they can.
HostGator is generally well regarded, as is A Small Orange, and Dreamhost.
Thanks, swagger. I haven't looked at Hostgator yet. Any ones to stay away from?
Dunno. I host all my sites on my own servers, so I don't have a lot of experience with 3rd parties. I did use Hostgator once for about a year, for a site that I didn't want easily connectable to me, and I know that Godaddy is a popular choice. That's why I recommended those two.
From a consumer standpoint, web hosting is a pretty simple affair these days for most people. Unless you want to do something that's very "outside the box," just about any of them should work. They all offer PHP, databases, a control panel, etc., so pick one based on price and reputation. Hosting is so cheap these days that there's very little risk should you decide to switch later.
Also, don't let the hosting company register the domains for you. Register them yourself at whatever registrar you want (I use Godaddy), and THEN buy a hosting package. I've heard a lot of horror stories about people letting their hosting company register the name, and then they're locked into using that host - the host would register the domains in their own name, instead of their customer's. Sleazy, but if it's buried in the fine print that you agree to, you're stuck.
2. Avoid using any kind of built in "site builder" provided by a host. These things generally build poorly constructed sites that are locked into the particular host's servers and programs and can't be easily moved to a new host later.
I did a site for non profit not too long a go free of charge, you know the saying "No good deed goes unpunished"?
They were using this proprietary backend and it allowed you to upload images. No FTP access directly to the original files. Had to do it through a web interface that would only bring up one image at a time, right click, save image, rinse and repeat. They had hundreds of them. Took me hours and gave me cramp.
I did a site for non profit not too long a go free of charge, you know the saying "No good deed goes unpunished"?
They were using this proprietary backend and it allowed you to upload images. No FTP access directly to the original files. Had to do it through a web interface that would only bring up one image at a time, right click, save image, rinse and repeat. They had hundreds of them. Took me hours and gave me cramp.
My mom built a site many years ago with one of those site builders, and when it came time to move hosts I basically had to save it via view source, and copy and paste the content of each page back into WP. Most of the actual files on the server were 90% JS with almost no html in the page.
My mom built a site many years ago with one of those site builders, and when it came time to move hosts I basically had to save it via view source, and copy and paste the content of each page back into WP. Most of the actual files on the server were 90% JS with almost no html in the page.
Well they had FTP access to the html files themselves and the images being served. The way this one worked was it generated the HTML, resized the images and deposited the files in the public_html folder. Moving the whole site as is wouldn't be an issue, you wouldn't be able to manage it anymore unless you knew how to edit HTML.
I tossed it all, I only wanted the original high quality images they uploaded but there was no FTP access for them.
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