websites and hosting

[The Great Wallsendo]

Is anyone able to put into laymans terms the pros/cons of registering a domain name and also then hosting the site?

Are there hidden costs once you've registered a domain?

Is a free host server really that?

Cheers in advance

[5150]

Had a couple of domains years ago that included hosting, was no other fee's involved other than you had to dial up (yes that long ago!) using their number whenever you wanted to upload, was just standard rate call though.

Last time we bothered, quite a few years back again mind, we got the domain name and just had it pointing to our free ISP's webspace, which was the cheapest way to go at the time. Downer with that was the site was quite image heavy so we quickly sucked up our bandwidth limit - got around that by hosting all the images on photobucket (ended up paying for a premium account).

Mates got his domain and hosting through hostonce, seems quite happy with them.

[SPIDER]

is this what u want

ProBoards.com - Free Message Boards

[The Great Wallsendo]

ProBoards.com - Free Message Boards

cheers for that mate - but not thinking about setting up a forum

[mark]

depends what you want to do. There's a degree of you get what you pay for

One of my servers costs me £700 a month but that one is a real monster though

got others that cost a fraction of that and do everything that is asked of them

domain names are the easy bit, almost. watch the small print though. A lot of places you can buy cheap domain names, lock you in so you have to buy their hosting, or charge you transfer fees if you want it hosted elsewhere

free host servers are rarely that. you might find they force a frame on your site with advertising you don't want, or force popups on your site with ads

a lot of the free hosting that comes with a domain has limitations that you will hit against fairly quickly. again small print for how much bandwidth allowance you get. plus you might find limits over email serving, add-ons, storage and so on

so, the questions you need to answer first are, do you want a fully featured email server@yourdomain.com. how much bandwidth will you use and what are the charges per Mb if you go over. what is going to be on the site you intend to build? how secure you want it to be etc

anything that needs cgi-scripts, databases, dynamic content, SSL etc - you'll not find any of that on free hosting

its also useful to know what the server spec is, what's it location geographically, and what is its network connection

you might find something that promises loads of bells and whistle, but has a crappy shared data pipe so is dog slow

[davem2005]

As mark says , if you want the whistles and bells like PHP and Mysql databases you need to pay for hosting.

We host our websites on Streamline.net. and have had no problems at all with them. Pay two years up front and for a fancy package you pay around 35 quid a year including registering a domain, email , databases, unlimited bandwidth and a basic build your own site programme . E commerce hosting does cost extra

Just one thing to watch out for is when you register a domain it is included in the price BUT at the end of two years you need to reregister the domain and that suddenly costs a 100 quid or more!! I got round this by reregistering with a slightly different name but you will be offline for a day or so whilst the DNS catches up.

Go for a PHP website not a HTML one as they are far easier to update and change. There are a lot of free PHP templates out there to get you started, and plenty of tutorials.

That proboards website is a good place to go for help on site building.

Good luck...you will need it.


Cheers
Dave