I put this here because I assume there is no ‘right’ answer to it. If it seems more suited to GQ or CS, please feel free to move it.
My father in law has asked me to put together a web site for his cemetary association. Now, I can put a page together, but have no idea as far as hosting, domains, etc.
Here are the criteria-
the page is for a non-profit group.
he would like it to have it’s own domain (i.e. no geocities/~name stuff)
the site will be mostly text. I don’t think we need 1 gig of space or anything.
He’s looking for a no cost/ low cost option (preferably no cost)
He would like to avoid banners, etc. all over it
that’;s about it. any ideas? And would a non-profit fall under a .org heading?
These two do not match. Having your domain costs money.
The advantage of Geocities Plus (which we use for my wife’s non-commercial art site, www.lu-art.com) is that it allows you at reasonable cost (something like 9 USD/month) to have your own domain, as well as the use of the extremely user-friendly PageBuilder in case you are HTML illitterate like we are.
I purchased the domain name for my business’ web site at go-daddy.com. $7.95 for a one-year lease. They make up the low cost by offering you lots of additional services. Buy them if they seem valuable to you, but feel free to pass on all of them and take the cheap registration.
As for hosting, I researched a number of providers on various webmaster newsgroups and ended up choosing page-zone.com. I pay $4.95 a month for our site, and have been very happy with their performance for half a year now.
A word to the wise: you may save money buying a year or two at a time, but you can easily be stranded if the company you buy from goes belly up next month. I feel much safer spending a tad more to purchase monthly service.