Server Recommendation?

[Mariness]

I have noticed that a lot of you have websites for your boats. If we manage to get past the discussion phase and into the yes-lets-get-to-it phase, I would like to set up one for our project (which will probably start way before the setting-sail fun part). I figure, writing things down, taking notes, keeping track, really helps me manage anxiety (an inevitable part of such a big project). So as long as I'm doing it, might as well make it official.
Would someone be able to recommend a good server/hosting service? If it has worked well for your site - or conversely, if they turned out to be a bad choice - to give me some idea where to start?

[Sumner]

When I started my site about 10 years or more ago I was with a hoisting company that got bought up by Radiant Communications and have been with them ever since. I might find another place a little cheaper, but it seems my site is always up and it is fast getting to it and downloading from it.

I can recommend them....

Radiant Communications | Shared Web Hosting | Starter Hosting

.... but they might be a little more expensive than you want to spend. I pay $250 a year, but they have cheaper packages.

I don't know if it is still true, but at one time you had the option of them hosting your site on a US server or Canadian. The Canadian was cheaper and where I've been ever since.

You might want to try maybe a free one or your provider might have the option to host you for what you are paying now up to some limits. I didn't want a site with adds all over it and popping up, so went the way I did. I also didn't later want to move it to another server and go through that situation.

Good luck with the site and the boat,

Sum

[rebel heart]

We use squarespace with great results.

[Patient]

I use Network Solutions.

Your domain should be around $25-$30 (Annual), but the Unix package is only $12 a month. That package includes everything you need including email accounts, FTP and even MySQL databases for your blog or KML route tracking.

You can install Wordpress yourself (Very easy to do) and then use the email post function to quickly update your blog via email while offshore.

The other bonus is that they are international, so if you have any problems there tends to be a local support number you can call where ever you might be.

[janders]

My suggestion would be to start simple and free with a blog. We use blogger and are pretty happy with it. That's an easy and cheap way to start out. You can buy your own domain and point it to your blogger blog.

We use three sites for www.svhelloworld.com:

The main website is hosted by GoDaddy. They are fine, we pay $5 month and we get PHP, mySQL, 10GB of storage and 300GB of thru-put. The service has been rock solid. Their website is horrible which I would find terribly ironic and funny if it weren't so goda**ed infuriating.

Our photo site - photos.svhelloworld.com - we use Smugmug. Photos take a lot of bandwidth and storage so we decided to pay for Smugmug. It's a great service with unlimited storage and a bazillion options to store and retrieve your photos how you want. With our cruising, our photos do the most to tell the story so we wanted to make sure we had a good spot for them.

Our blog - blog.svhelloworld.com - is hosted by blogger. We just point the domain to them. We also spent a bit of time to customize our blog template so it matched the design on our website. If you're handy with CSS and HTML, you can do all sorts of stuff with the blogger templates. The same is true of Smugmug actually, we just never got around to updating that template.

More here: s/v hello world: about this site

[Captin_Kirk]

hostgator is one of the best I have found. I run multiple sites and these guys have never let me down. At only 6.95 a month it is one of the cheapest as well. As a bonus there server farm is powered by wind generators making it one of the few "green" facilities available.

[richardhula]

Have a look at SailBlogs also - there is a free option.

[Mariness]

Wow! Thanks - now I'm off to do look into those options

[Jim D]

Janders, I thought your post was a great bit on info and sold me to check it out, and consider copying your scheme. However, via none of the links anywhere can I get to the photos, as I only get the invalid url message. On the website and blog the photos are all replaced by "?" marks.

What's up - is it me, clicking poorly?

Jim

[richardhula]

Originally Posted by Jim D

Janders, I thought your post was a great bit on info and sold me to check it out, and consider copying your scheme. However, via none of the links anywhere can I get to the photos, as I only get the invalid url message. On the website and blog the photos are all replaced by "?" marks.

What's up - is it me, clicking poorly?

Jim

Sounds like your web browser is not set up to view images. Try a different browser or go into Settings/Options & look for Show Images option. Sometimes you get this option by right clicking on the empty image space.

[Jim D]

[QUOTE=richardhula;454038]Sounds like your web browser is not set up to view images. QUOTE]


Thanks - I will check that out when I am next at home. For me, that does not make sense since I use my laptops to view images all over the web, all the time. I do know about right clicking and that didn't solve the dilemma.

And FWIW, right now I am on a different computer, using a different browser, and connected from a different place. (This is a Dell using Explorer; and my normal personal, at-home machine is a Macbook Pro using Safari.)
And right now, when I try to view your pics, i get the famous and irritating Explorer screen informing me:

[IMG]res://C:\WINDOWS\system32\shdoclc.dll/pagerror.gif[/IMG]The page cannot be found

The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

So needless to say, I remain frus-ter-ated.

[janders]

Apologies, there's a DNS setting that doesn't seem to be taking. I'm working with Yahoo on it at the moment.

Originally Posted by Jim D

Janders, I thought your post was a great bit on info and sold me to check it out, and consider copying your scheme. However, via none of the links anywhere can I get to the photos, as I only get the invalid url message. On the website and blog the photos are all replaced by "?" marks.

What's up - is it me, clicking poorly?

Jim