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How much do you pay to have a personal web site?

Chuck_P

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I'm doing some preliminary research on establishing a website but am so clueless on how it should be smartly done.

Anyone using "Visual Server" for their website? It seems appealing to me because it seems very simple and that in itself is an immediate red flag to my senses. Here's the link to the features that are provided http://www.visualserver.com/VS/Features.cfm for each of these different prices:

* There is a $50 one-time setup charge, then:

Visual Server Lite:
*40 images - No Stats
*$20 monthly or $200 annually

Visual Server Standard:
*150 images - Image / Portfolio Hit Stats
*$30 monthly or $300 annually

All advice is greatly appreciated, thanks.

Chuck
 
I use yahoo. $11.95 per month. Lots of space. You can use their site bulider, or upload from your own. Very reliable, good stats.
 
I use Visual Server and I love it. The sites are professional, ridiculously easy to update, and their tech support is nearly jargon free. The downside is cost and no email hosting. I made the switch from go daddy about a year ago, and am very pleased with the decision.
 
Pretty much depends on how involved you want to be in site creation. If you do your own design then a personal site should be around $5 US a month. If you go with a host+built in design service I suppose anywhere from 20-50 a month. The bonus with designing your own site is that you are not tied to any proprietary systems. With your own design you can have a local copy and put it on any host you like. If you are feeling a bit adventurous download the Dreamweaver demo here: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/ go through a few tutorials, you might find it's not so bad.
 
I have a software that starts at low monthly prices, It includes hosting as well as your site and a nice package for artist to use. No start up fees, no hidden fees, just a flat monthly subscription. Unlimited images, categories, blogs, etc...

If you are interested let me know.

Kev
 
I recommend you talk to Bill Schwab, North Light Photographic Workshops. Bill has his own web server, charges very reasonable hosting fees, and will build a site for you if you like. I know of at least one APUGGER whose site he has built. I am building my own using Dreamweaver and am renting server space from Bill.
 
I use StartLogic. About $90. a year. I built mine with Dreamweaver. I am rebuilding it now and expect a re-launch of V 7.0 in a couple of weeks. If you create your own website, it's much easier (and cheaper) to update than having to continually buy the service.
 
Whatever you use to build your site try and get a hosting package that includes mySQL as this makes running an online store very easy and cheap to do. Preferably allowing more than one database, then you can experiment if necessary with a 2nd or 3rd database.

Watch out for commercial software that doesn't allow the pages to fit the screen properly. APUG is a perfect example of how a modern site should look at various screen resolutions, the Portfolio section here section is a very tidy way of displaying images and the Lightbox script not very difficult to use yourself.

Ian
 
JBrunner said:
I use yahoo. $11.95 per month. Lots of space. You can use their site bulider, or upload from your own. Very reliable, good stats.
Click to expand...
Just FYI, a local club to which I belong had someone volunteer to take over our web site maintenance, moving it to Yahoo! in the process. I had set up a Google calendar to allow web posting of our events. But according to the current site maintainer, Yahoo! blocks any link to a Google calendar (and perhaps other services that I'm not aware of) from their hosting platforms, so that calendar is no longer usable by the club web site. If you have a need, practical or philosophical, for net neutrality, you might want to look for a provider other than Yahoo!

(Maybe when M$ completes their hostile takeover of Yahoo! they'll become more net neutral. )

Lee
 
That's pretty much how I do our site. The best deal is to make the site yourself in something like Dreamweaver or Front Page, and host with someone like GoDaddy. I don't remember what we pay, but it's something like $5/month if you purchase 3 years worth.
 
I host my own site. It isn't hard. My ISP provides me with two static IP addresses automatically (some providers charge for this). I run my own DNS hosting and run Apache on the same machine that runs my file server in the basement, under Debian Linux. The only cost to me is the electricity to run the machine.

I like doing it this way because I have full control over the content. The bad side, of course, is if the machine fails, I have to fix it. Since this is a rare event and my site is non-critical, I can accept this risk.

As a bonus, I have emails up on my domains, too. The geek in me likes having my own vanity email address.
 
I use Dreamweaver for my website, pretty easy once you get the hang of it.
I host my site with GoDaddy.com for about $5 a month.
 
Several people have been saying they use Dreamweaver software to build their web page and from the link that Sean provided, didn't that software cost about $400 dollars? I'll have to check that again maybe I have that wrong.
 
CPorter said:
Several people have been saying they use Dreamweaver software to build their web page and from the link that Sean provided, didn't that software cost about $400 dollars? I'll have to check that again maybe I have that wrong.
Click to expand...
If you pay full retail, the Dreamweaver Suite is expensive. See if you can qualify for an educational discount, which makes it much cheaper.

There are a number of free HTML composers. Here is a list of some of them:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/htmleditors.shtml
There are others as well.

I haven't maintained a page for a while. I did build a site, mostly with Dreamweaver about 8 years ago, but found Dreamweaver tedious and overblown as a maintenance tool. So I used text editors and some smaller wysiwyg HTML editors for quick edits on small sections and a fast ftp client for uploads. You might find the latest free release of Kompozer useful. Dead Link Removed It's available for OS-X, Windows, and Linux. Don't know for sure if it's good under Vista.

Lee
 
Does anyone know how is the site" Dead Link Removed" or does anyone use this site to make a web site?

Greg
 
Thanks for all the responses---I looked at a lot of your suggestions. I believe I'm going to settle on simplicity as the primary deciding factor. I believe that Yahoo's new web hosting service it the ticket for me right now. I've already got the domain name and a few preliminaries completed. I will be getting a scanner soon and hope to be able to publish it in a couple of months.

thanks again for all the advice
Chuck
 
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