Buying a domain and hosting it...

[beavereater]

I found this at www.afmu.com

Plan B - One Free Domain
Hosts 6 Domains
20 GB Monthly Data Transfer
800 MB Disk Storage
PHP, CGI, FrontPage Extensions
20 MySQL Databases
250 POP Email accounts, Unlimited Email Forwarders
Easy to use Control Panel.

It's about 8 bucks a month. Now, I've never run my own homepage, and don't understand much about it. What I wondered is, would this be more than enough or are there certain things missing that I don't know about. Also, the One Free Domain part...does that mean they will give me a .com for free...or something like www.afmu.com/public/something.com?

My homepage is gonna be for my private English tutoring here in Japan and I want to have a homepage people can go to to check out. I wouldn't mind running a forum on there for students so they can discuss homework and English related topics. Other than that...can anyone give me some advice?

[rallynavvie]

I use PowWeb. Costs about the same as what you posted ($7.77 a month still I think) but has a lot more with it.
www.powweb.com

As for the domain I went through a third party and buy it in 5-year increments since it costs next to nothing to do it this way. I think PowWeb offers domain services as well though, and it may be easier to manage it from one place.

The forum can be tricky to add sometimes, but I know they support most all scripting languages. There are also some simple template you could use to get the forum started. I've never tried doing one though.

[VegasBud]

I've been researching web hosting packages for my sister, so she can move her website to a better service, for less money, and it seems most of the "Budget Hosting" packages are in the $7-$8 range.

One of the final contenders I'm looking at for her is Inmotion Hosting, which includes a bulletin board/forum as part of the package.

BlueHost also says they supply a "Bulletin Board (Message Forum)".

You should probably do some additional research on if those would work for your purposes.

When you are considering what hosting company to use, you might want to check out your contenders here. It's the only seemingly honest hosting review site I could find (at least they gave my sister's current host bad marks, which were well deserved).

[Faustus]

I reg my domain through domains410.com for $10 a year with DNS provided by them.

My site is very very low traffic (used mainly for email) and I use a $30/year account with doorhost.net for that.

Total yearly cost: $40

[rallynavvie]

Interesting site. I'm surprised my host was listed so high, I figured it would be lost among all the other host services out there. One thing to note about the overview of PowWeb on that page: the bandwidth listed there is daily, not monthly like the other listings. There's good and bad with this. The good being that you get more overall bandwidth and if you hit your peak bandwidth for the day it is reset at midnight so it's accessable the next day rather than waiting until the end of the month for your bandwidth allowance to be reinstated. The bad part is you don't carry over bandwidth from previous days and if you plan on getting hit all at once then you may surpass your limit. I'm not hosting video on it so I don't think I'll hit my quota ever, it's usually only maybe 2GB tops on some days.

[beavereater]

Thanks for the help...I think I'll check out some of those sites and send out a couple email...

[beavereater]

OK...I'm gonna include this in this topic, since it's relevant. I see all these packages, and all the options that go with it. Most of them I don't understand. I don't know what I need, or why I need it. I've setup a forum before, it's pretty easy and I did it in Japanese (that was the difficult part, setting up a database on the server for it)...but I got it done. Everything else though, I don't understand. Can someone explain it or know of a good site that explains everything?

[rallynavvie]

Well the basics there:

Storage space - sort of like the hard drive for your website. This will limit how many pictures, pages, and other media you can store on it for people to see (or not see if you put it in private directories).

Bandwidth - how much of the data on your site can be downloaded/uploaded during a certain period. So say you had a huge movie file that was 500MB in size and had 10GB daily bandwidth. You would be limited to 20 complete downloads of that movie in a day before your bandwidth limit is reached (20 * 500MB = 10GB). Forums tend to access a lot of files (the database for it) so they will use a little more bandwidth than say just a simple web page. Plus folks are uploading to it (when they post) so that adds a little too. Unless you're hosting large video files then most of those sites should suffice for bandwidth.

Email - usually the site will tell you how many email addresses you can have with the package. Mine has 650 available so folks can have their own email with my domain name which I give out to columnists and media reps. This is my favorite feature as I like having full control over my email provider and hate using free ones like Hotmail and Gmail.

Were there any other aspects you had questions about? I'm no web programmer but I've been running my own domain for almost 10 years now.

[VegasBud]

Can someone explain it or know of a good site that explains everything?

I doubt very much that there is such a site. It would have to be the size of an encyclopedia. Even if you could find such a site, it would take you years to learn everything (if that's even possible). Web publishing is a huge topic.

All the hosting companies are trying to outdo each other in the competition for your business, so their packages include everything but the kitchen sink. Nobody is going to use all the options they include.

All that really matters are the basics that rallynavvie listed above, and whether any of the additional features would be of benefit to you. In your case, having a forum would be an advantage. Also it would probably be in your interest to choose a company that has high marks for customer/technical support. That way, you can experiment with all those mysterious extra features at your own pace, and if you have a problem, you can get help from someone who is being paid to help you.

We take betting seriously here in Las Vegas, but I would be willing to bet that any of the top ranked services reviewed at the site I mentioned above would have everything you'll need, plus a whole lot more, and at a great price.

[beavereater]

Were there any other aspects you had questions about? I'm no web programmer but I've been running my own domain for almost 10 years now.

Too many aspects I'd like to know more about. ALLL those options listed are what confuse me. I looked at 2 of the top 10 sites for Canada. 1 was super high storage and bandwith with unlimited email and what not...the other was lower and about 2.5 times the price. Why would that be? I'd go with the cheaper one that has the basics, but I'd freak if I found out I needed something that wasn't on the list of endless features.

Maybe I'll just have take a leap and go with one company by trial and error.