[Web Informant] 15 April 2009: Cheap choices for Web hosting

[David Strom]

Web Informant 15 April 2009: Cheap choices for Web hosting

These days, it doesn't make sense to pay a lot of dough to host your
Web site. I am going to give you three alternatives that won't cost
you more than $5 a month. All three are great for people who don't
have a lot of HTML coding expertise and don't want to shell out the
big bucks to pay for graphic designers and programmers. I have built
sites using all three methods and while they do have their
limitations, they are all acceptable for handling the basics, and in
some cases will do a lot more advanced things as well.

Let's start off with GoDaddy. First, we choose whatever dotcom name
your little heart desires, and hopefully is still available.. Next, we
take a look at what GoDaddy offers for its own Web hosting plans. If
you go to their sign-up page online, you will see lots of choices.
Pick the Economy Plan for Linux. If you want to host more than one
domain from the same server, you would pick the Deluxe Plan. You can
get a better deal for two-year contracts if you call their customer
support line rather than signing up online. Still, it works out to $5
a month, on top of the registrar fee to register your domain.

Why Linux? Because we will be using their Wordpress..org installation,
and that works better on Linux. You don't need to know anything about
Linux to run your site, you get the same great features of having a
world-class blogging platform that you have with a Wordpress.com
hosted site, and you can do a lot more with it as well.

Included in the GoDaddy hosting account are a ton of free
applications. Besides Wordpress, you can install Drupal, Joomla,
Mambo, PostNuke, various shopping cart applications, phpBB, and dozens
more. The Wordpress install is very straightforward and takes a few
minutes, and once that is done you can use your Web browser to run
just about everything that you require.

Using GoDaddy-hosted Wordpress is great if your content can work
within the blogging format, if you want better control over your pages
than you would get with Wordpress.com-hosting, and if you want to add
ads and analytics to your site but don't want to build your pages from
scratch. One thing that the self-hosted Wordpress isn't as good as the
dotcom hosted is the ability to stream video content. You are better
off using the dotcom hosting and buying the 5GB space upgrade and
running your videos there.

Let's move on to the second method, using Microsoft's OfficeLive Small
Business hosting account. What I like about OfficeLive SB is that you
can buy your domain name through Microsoft, although if you plan on
moving it to some other provider later on, that might be difficult.
Microsoft also doesn't charge you for the first year that you have the
domain, and then $15 a year thereafter. You can't beat that price. You
go to the following page to sign up:
http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/pricing

The Microsoft plan is great if you have Windows and a relatively
recent version of IE (v6 or later, running on XP or Vista) that you
are going to use to build your site. They give you some simple
templates for your page design, and if your site is going to be
composed of a few static pages, then this is a really fast way to
assemble a site and the price is rock-bottom. They will also hide your
domain registration from public whois queries as part of the deal.

What about the third method? Check out the site Weebly.com. They offer
free web site hosting, ties into Gmail and Register.com for domain
registration as part of their package. I don't care for Register.com
because they charge $35 a year for registering your domain where
GoDaddy and others charge less than $10, but what is appealing about
Weebly is that you have a lot of control over page design and widgets
and templates as well as integration into Google's Gmail for your
domain. The basic service is free, but if you want more than the
freebie site – such as password-protected pages, audio players and
support, it will cost the same as a more capable GoDaddy account,
about $4 a month.

All three will give you more email addresses than you know what to do
with, and all are good starting places for your own exploration for
other hosting providers, which are overwhelming. Feel free to share
your own recommendations here.