Website Help

robjvargas said:

One of the big reasons I recommend both Blogger and wordpress.com is that they make great starter platforms, and are easy to move to self-hosted if and when the owner feels ready to do so.

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Yes; completely fair comment here, of course.

(My possible reservation is that so many people get used to them, find it easy, and don't bother moving ... and some of those people really do go on, without "doing anything wrong", to have a "big accident" they could actually have avoided.)

atthebeach said:

I was referring to having your own domain

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You can have your own domain and host its site at blogger.com or wordpress.com, but if you do that, you're just as subject to their terms of service as you are if you use one of their free subdomains.

I mention it only because I know that some people imagine that if they use their own domain, which they registered elsewhere, for their blog hosted at blogger.com, they'll be immune from Blogger's idiosyncratic, inconsistent, appeal-free interpretations of their own terms of service, and that's wrong, and I've heard 100 sob-stories illustrating it.

atthebeach said:

I just looked back and saw Laer Carroll used the term self-hosting vs. free sites

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This point causes much confusion.

People often think of "free sites" as meaning "hosted-for-you places like Blogger and wordpress.com". This isn't quite right. There are also "free hosts" (some of which aren't too bad) for "self-hosted blogs", such as byethost.com, 000WebHost.com and freehostia.com (among others). "Self-hosted" is not the counterpart to "free".

Those are a generally better (but still free) way for people to have their own WordPress blog, without being dependent on wordpress.com and their unfriendly terms of service, limited range, and so on.

In the long run, paid hosting is always likely to be better quality, and have better customer service, than free hosting.

So it's confusing, to the uninitiated.

(I just hope I've resolved more confusion than I've caused, in this thread!).

atthebeach said:

I want full control of my website, and not the restrictions mentioned above, so that is why I am not using any of those places.

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Very wise. The only real reason for not doing what you propose to do is "financial considerations", for those to whom $5-ish per month for paid self-hosting is "an expense too far".

I've been with Hostgator for over 3 years now and they've been fine. For the number of convenient tools you receive and features, the $8.95/month package has been perfectly suitable for me.

Register.com and Networksolutions.com are two popular domain registrars that are fairly priced.

Network Solutions isn't terrible, but Register.com is charging me US$37 to renew. For one year.

I won't be renewing.

For those wondering about companies owned by EIG:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group#Companies_under_EIG

Whether a site is self- or free-hosted is irrelevant to how many visitors it gets. What is more important is how long the site has existed, how popular the author’s books are, how often the owner posts, and how interesting the content is.

As a case in point, SF writer John Scalzi’s Whatever WordPress.com site has crossed the 30 million view point. It typically gets 50,000 visits a day with a lot of variation above and below.

It has been around since early 2008. He is a popular sci-fi writer. He posts daily. He is often funny, always entertaining.

So by all means explore self-hosting your site. But once it’s up, there are lots of other issues to consider.

Assuming I want to stay away from EIG, does anyone have thoughts about Site5, D9, or Namecheap? This would be for a church site, which is primarily going to be a Wordpress site.