Here’s the deal, I am a graphic designer who has always concentrated on print. I quit my job a month ago to go freelance and quite a few of my customers are enquiring whether I do web design as well. I am learning Dreamweaver and am pretty sure that I’ll be ok with the web design, my problem is that I have no clue about web hosting and how to actually get my web pages online. Where do I get or register domain names and is it possible to use my home computer as a server or is that not a good idea (very fast, very big machine). Can anyone recommend a good webhosting service? Anything else I need to know?
Hosting out of your home is not recommended. For one thing your ISP may not be able to handle the bandwidth and secondly if your site large it will be slow.
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Register a name, as a DBA, LLC, or whatever.
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Register a Domain Name. You can find domain name registering anywhere on the net.
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Find a host. Host’s that have over a 98% up time, or declare as such are hard to find. But they don’t have bandwidth restrictions as bad as Cable Modem or DSL.
3a. Find a host that has the cheapest SSL certificates.
3b. Find a host that offers any type of platform. like… www.startlogic.com
[INDENT]3c. The host should cost more than $10 a month.
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Dreamweaver is OKAY. If you plan on selling products, I would stick with PHP and MySQL, or ASP. Dreamweaver is finicky when dealing tables.
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for informational sites, unless you are in need of a gallery of sorts, like Photo’s, art, music, or anything artsy fartsy, limit Flash usage.
Using home computer as web server
I done this before, and I recommend you use Apache, and to make sure your anti-virus and firewalls are enabled and up-to-date. However, it is not wise to do this for a long-time basis. Your computer cannot handle too many traffic, and if traffic does peak up, you may get a warning from your ISP. Some of them don’t like their bandwidth to be used for hosting.
Some ISP provides free webspace. Check with them.
Free web-hosting
The most troublesome thing about those used to be the werid url names they generate for you and the pop-up ads. Some have pretty strange restrictions, most notably are the lack of folders, a maximum size for each file and the requirement to add in an ad. Also, they are obiliged to take down your content anytime they want.
I am not sure how decent they will be if you do pay, but some other web-host may be more suitable. You’ll see, some sites need to have their own web-host. A business site on Geocities is unlikely to gain much credibility.
Paid web-hosting
Paid web-hosting usually has better services than free ones (at least the one I know). They generally provide utilties and tools to help you to upload to your webspace. Some web-hosting companies also help you with the registeration of your own domain name.
Usually, you have three ways to get a “domain name”. One is to register it (a nominal fee is required) online. More info can be gotten at the InterNIC site.
On a web-hosting side, usually you will get a sub-domain (such as yourname.webhost.com) or a folder (webhost.com/yourfolder). You can use a redirction service to “re-route” people to your website. For example, people typing in goto.yoursite.com will bring you straight to your website. It allows you to pass to people an easier to remember and more relevant url.
Uploading and online files
It’s good to ensure that there are no spaces between the filenames. Remember that most web-servers are Linux or such, and they are case sentitive, so be careful when naming your files. Generally, one uses a FTP program to upload files to a web-server. The host will give you a password and by logging in with your user name and password, you can upload files directly to folders, something akin to Window Explorer. WS FTP is not bad, but is commerical though a download verison is available for educational purposes.
I hope this helps.
And if they do claim high uptime, they may lie.
I had a co-worker use one hosting firm that reported “99.9% uptime”.
The entire web hosting service (not just my co-worker’s site) spent nearly two hours down.
He looked at their “uptime report” the next day, and they listed 100% uptime the day before.
How big are the websites going to be? And do you want POP3 mailboxes as well as the hosting?
Thanks everyone for your answers. I guess I am going to have to do more research because most of your answers went right over my head :). I think I am going to have to get hold of my friend who does websites and see if he will help me. They’re not going to be big sites, mostly tourist related and no selling involved, although the site for the lawyer’s office will be mostly informational I would guess and may be slightly larger.
Anyone point me in the direction of a good website where I could learn more (internet for dummies?)
Your best bet here is personally asking people you know about their web host, and if it is reliable. No reason for them to lie.
I like my web host Start Logic. They are very cheap ($7.50 a month), give you a huge amount of space (5 gb), a whole suite of tools and templates including your own message board, give you unlimited e-mail accounts under your domain, and have good customer service. You can go to their website, register a domain online, and have space set up with everything ready to go by tomorrow.
If it where me, I would buy a re-seller package. If you have clients and you want them to all have
www.thierwebsite.com’s and you get a couple of them that want websites, then you can not only make money on the developing side but also the hosting side. A typical webhosting reseller is 30-40$ a month with unlimited domain hosting ability.
You can then charge whatever rate you would like (7-10$) a month to your clients, and if nothing else pay your hosting bill. The other good thing about that is they never need to see your actually renting space, because its all done through you.
No, no, NO! DANGER WILL ROBINSON! DANGER! Never, ever have the same company as your domain name registrar AND ALSO your web host. This is a Very Bad Idea for multiple reasons. The most obvious is if the registrar + host goes bad, because they control both your domain name and web server it can be impossible to just switch. If my web host becomes craptacularly bad, I just switch to another host, and point my domain name with my registrar to the new host’s domain name servers, and FTP the whole site up to the new host. After that it is just a matter of waiting for DNS propagation worldwide, which can take about a day or so.
This likely is a good idea. Problem is you’ll need to learn how to be a webmaster as well as a web designer. Most clients would expect you to handle both functions, unless they are very security conscious. Separating the functions would mean that a site couldn’t immediately be updated.
Amen. I have posted numerous times (as has rfgdxm) about what a bad idea this is. The most excruciating part of my job as a Web designer who does her own hosting is assisting my clients with domain transfers.
Go to http://www.godaddy.com and get your domain name(s). You can “park” them for free (buy them without having a host/Nameserver to point to). Then when you find a host you like, look through their documentation to see if they tell you what nameservers to use. Or ask them if they will tell you what nameservers to use. If they won’t tell you this info or if they try to persuede you to transfer the domain name to their registrar, move along.
Sage advice. In the world of Web hosting, you get what you pay for for sure.
The problem is that there are lousy, expensive web hosts out there. 
And I use a quite reliable web host that is $4.95 a month for 1 domain name. Up time is well over 99%.
As long as you are a decent learner, and choose a decent host, the reseller control panel allows you to access pretty much all the websites on one page.
He needs to mess with www.websiteA.com he clicks the drop-down box or the static link, and voila, in the Cpanel or whichever he chooses.
Or option B (The one I prefer) access them all from FTP. As long as he pay’s the host he can have all his clients on one server www.hiscompany.com and offer discounts on a package deal. Hire me to design your site and I will get you a domain name plus give you 3 months free hosting and only X dollars every month after!
To me the biggest benefit is the recurring income, designing the site or updating it gets you money once in a while, hosting it gets you money every month, plus a sense of legitimacy.
My bad, didn’t mean to make them clickable links!
Oh how I know that feeling. I chose a “expensive 99% uptime” host initially for our company. Huge mistake, I learned to search for complaints before choosing a host. And then talking to people, I ended up finding a great reseller host for 39.00 a month. So little downtime I have never noticed one down.
But, depending on your business it may be smart to do what we did, we have two reseller packages with two different hosts. With all of our websites on both hosts (Without the DNS pointing to them) meaning that if host A goes down for an extended period of time, we can switch over to host B in the day or two it takes for DNS propagation, without have to FTP all of our files back and forth.
Sounds paranoid but, if you have one customer come to a “dead” site you lost a possible customer and a possible repeat customer. Because the internet is an impatient shopper.
Not to mention if googlebot is out hunting and keeps hitting your dead website.
Sorry for spewing.
biddee
I’d try to choose a host that has been around a few years and also one that has reasonable hosting statistics. A webhost that will give you 500 gigabytes of online storage and 500 gigabytes of bandwidth for $9.95 per month may actually be legitimate. However, they also might just be starting out and willing to spend a lot of venture capital to make their site attractive to potential customers. If they get a lot of high bandwidth customers, they will lose money very fast and will go out of business very quickly.
Anyway, my webhost is www.thebook.com . I’ve been with them for 6 years and have had no problems with them. Some people might consider them a little pricey but visit their website and make your own judgment. As you’ve probably learned, you have a huge choice of webhosts so you don’t have to be too quick to choose.
Good luck.
Each website you create will need to be hosted somewhere. Sometimes a company will have that organised independently, other times you’ll be asked to organise it yourself.
I don’t know if this is necessarily a good idea, but have you considered finding a hosting company locally, probably just a small one, and garnering a relationship with them so a) you can be their web designer, and b) they can be your hosting provider?
Just a thought.
Since others have mentioned their web host, I’ll mention mine: http://page-zone.com/plans.shtml. As you can see by today’s standards they are hardly dirt cheap. I have the 2 Domain plan, 500 MB web space, with 8GB transfer for $6.95. You can get way more disk space and transfers than that with a lot of hosts. I’ve just never switched because they are so damn good and reliable. Uptime is well over 99%. Easy to see from my logs the uptime. My sites get so much traffic that there is never an hour with zero hits. Any time I see no hits in a given hour I conclude the site was down. This is quite rare. There customer support is also excellent. At one point because a domain was going over the monthly bandwidth, they just doubled that to 6 GB/mo for free. And at another time, I almost freaked out when I learned 20/20 later that day was doing a news report on Coricidin abuse. The other website is http://www.coricidin.org, which is #1 on all the major search engines on a search for “Coricidin”. I knew that the huge amount of additional hits I’d be getting from that news report would quickly blow past the 1 GB monthly limit for that domain. I quickly shot off an e-mail asking to increase the bandwidth immediately, and I’d pay whatever it took. They just raised the bandwidth to 6 GB, and didn’t charge. The domain still is set at 6 GB/mo, and they never asked for extra money. I’m much more interested in reliability and quality customer service than saving a few extra bucks a month. When the service shines, I remain loyal.
And the more expensive accounts really aren’t that expensive. 101 domain names allowed with 3GB disk space, and 40GB monthly transfers for $24.95 ain’t bad for the flexibility. Page-Zone uses CPanel with Web Host Manager for the higher priced accounts. You can add and delete domains, and allocate disk space and bandwidth between the domains without ever having to contact customer support. This means no delays, and possible miscommucation. Ideal if you are handling the hosting requirements for clients you have designed websites for.
As for registrars, Godaddy is good. Registerfly (an enom reseller) also is quite good. Whoever you use, MAKE SURE to set the domains as REGISTRAR LOCK. If you don’t, it is too easy for others to hijack your domain. REGISTRAR LOCK means that you are e-mailed about any attempt at a registrar change, and must approve it after you get an e-mail sent direct to you about it. Hijacked domains are a bitch to get control of back.
rfgdxm You have an email I sent it last night. Not sure if you got it.
biddee if you want a “how to” starting with registering the whole way to FTP trainer let me know, I have one ready to go for trainee’s here, just not uploaded. I can make some minor proprietary changes and upload it later tonight or tomorrow. Its simplified for people with no knowledge of website hosting, updating multiple sites.
[hijack] Bandwidth is currently in the yellow for my company and I found out why, someone is downloading all our pages, and images, hundreds of thousands of them, no clue why but need to stop them. Currently taking some sites offline, then back online back and forth trying to disrupt them. Any help? [/hijack]