Hey UOers,

  Does anyone have any recomondations, or warnings, about various web hosting services?  I am shifting to being an independent contractor, and I want the appearence of being a professional outfit, even though I plan on naming my dogs to senior positions in my company.

 

I am thinking a simple web page with 5? email addresses?

 

 

 

Westport Welding Technology

 

Danny Labrador - Chief Innovation Officer - in charge of break out technology

 

Heather Staffordshire - Client Relations

 

Jack Sheppard - Chief Compliance Officer

 

 

I'm in the process of setting up my webpage on Wix.com, which came highly rated on a lot of the "best web hosting service" hits I got during a Google search.  So far I like the templates, they're modern and slick, and reasonably easy to edit for someone like me with only a little graphic design/web design knowledge.  The price is reasonable, too.

 

edit- to be clear, the webpage in my sig line is not what I'm working on-it's just a placeholder from when I bought the domain on godaddy.com.  I didn't stick with them because the general consensus was that their templates are getting a little outdated.  The website has not gone live yet.

I've heard good things about Wix, as well. I also have a friend who swears by Hostmonster. I use GoDaddy because I got the first year during some type of sale, so it was cheapest then. Now I'm too lazy to move my website and it more than pays for itself with a couple of Google Ads, even though I'd make a few bucks more per year if I switched because it's a bit pricey. I don't use any templates or anything, I just code it myself and use Dreamweaver to manage it and upload it via FTP. 

Bluehost and Wordpress.

I have used 1&1 for over 13 years with nearly 100% uptime.

Awesome, thank you!  To be honest, I did not come across any of those names (or remember them) in my google exploring.

 

Well, I have heard of godaddy, but...

 

Thanks for the crowdsourced info!

I've switched over to 1&1 also.  It integrates well with WordPress, which means it is very easy to put together a responsive website.

Another one up for hostmonster. Unless you're trying to run off .Net platform. Last time I checked they didnt have iis as any of their packages and .net is a pain on apache. Everything else is good though. Ulimited domains on virtual server, unlimited emails, sufficient space for most likely anything you will need.

I've been with Columbus based IX Webhosting since 2004. http://www.ixwebhosting.com/

Great info, please keep 'em coming!

 

1and1 is the host for a small non profit whose website I maintain as a volunteer. I'm not a fan of it, to me as a power user, their interface is a bit confusing. Also, they've been a pain to transfer the contact information of the domain owner.

 

At work, I've used bluehost. They also offer WordPress installations and it's all right (no idea on the costs for both of these).

 

In both of these hosts, if you use WordPress, you'll need to use your back up plug-in (via WordPress) instead of whatever they have built in by default, to automate your backups (which you should do). On mobile at the moment, so I don't remember the plug-in used for backups on WordPress.

 

Personally, I use gandi.net for my domain name and pair.com as my website (I use jekyll for my website, which is a pain in the arse and would not recommend it) for the past year or so.

 

Excellent service in both although pair.Com isn't the cheapest.

 

 

I've heard good things about squarespace for a more turnkey solution (that had pre-designed templates) as well as wix

You don't need a traditional host for a static web page.  You will pay only for the domain name if you use Amazon Web Services and host a static html page by storing it in an S3 bucket (I'm assuming you won't have a ton of traffic, which basically means it will be free - if you do though, you'll only pay for what you use).  This is a great option that lets you pay basically nothing while your site is small and removes the worry about high availability as Amazon does that for you. Also if you ever decide you need to have better performance in different regions, you can utilize their CDN to store the files closer to where the users are (all around the globe).  AWS truly is a fantastic service that will scale with your needs and keep your costs pertinent to only what you use. /end advertisement (I personally use AWS services and am in love with them)

 

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html

Man, I must say I'm disappointed that some of you guys are content with static websites, generic templates, and being at the mercy of very specific web hosting services because their websites are "responsive". You guys need to learn to code!

 

It amazes me that in 2016, responsive web-design would be marketed as some sort of premium feature that folks are paying for. I haven't even hosted any of my web apps yet but it sounds like that's the case from what I read.

 

I just made a website in Visual Studio and probably spent 15 minutes on the work that made it responsive and that's only because of all the unique styling I did. To actually make it responsive, you can literally just download Boostrap, add the library to your solution and copy and paste a few lines of code (and believe it or not, bootstrap is a free open-source library that Twitter decided to share with the world out of the kindness of their heart.) It's absolutely free and pros use it.

 

For those of you who don't know, responsive just means that there's code that puts your elements within a grid, so if someone re-sizes their browser window on their computer, or is using a mobile device, it re-arranges the columns and rows of the grid and resizes the elements to fit your screen better and makes it easier to scroll.

 

I really think it would be worth it for all of you guys to at least learn HTML and CSS. HTML literally takes about 5 hours to learn and CSS only takes a day or two to really get it down. You really just need to learn the basics of how things are structured, honestly. Most web developers don't have code memorized; anything you need to implement, you just google it and copy and paste the code. If you really don't want to bother with it, I can understand why you'd just use a template, but if you want to have something fun and truly unique and true to you or even if you just want to somewhat alter a site of yours that is based on a template, I'd really recommend just learning how to code on the front end.

 

I really think it would be worth it for all of you guys to at least learn HTML and CSS. HTML literally takes about 5 hours to learn and CSS only takes a day or two to really get it down. You really just need to learn the basics of how things are structured, honestly. Most web developers don't have code memorized; anything you need to implement, you just google it and copy and paste the code. If you really don't want to bother with it, I can understand why you'd just use a template, but if you want to have something fun and truly unique and true to you or even if you just want to somewhat alter a site of yours that is based on a template, I'd really recommend just learning how to code on the front end.

 

I learned HTML in a computer class in 7th grade. We all learned it in a couple of weeks - it's really that easy to figure out. Most kids forgot it the second the class was over, like a lot of stuff in middle school, but I never let it go. In 8th grade I was given detention for a week for making satirical websites about different cliques - I think today this would be called cyber bullying. Anyway, CSS doesn't take much more effort - most everything you need to know is easily found via Google.  That said, I stopped paying attention and keeping up with the times when optimization for mobile devices started. My website hasn't changed in years but it's basically a photo gallery so I think it holds its own. But if you get the basics of HTML, which in my opinion aren't much more difficult than formatting threads on this forum, and the basics of CSS, you understand the structure behind websites and templates and can customize them to make them your own.

For someone starting up a small business, I would highly recommend going into a platform like Squarespace or Wix. There is no sense in installing a CMS like Wordpress or Drupal that you would be responsible for maintaining. Even though many web hosts make it "easy" to install them, security updates come out frequently, and if you forget to install them, you are leaving the door open for attacks.

I really appreciate all of the feedback.  Now I just need a cure for procrastination and just do it.