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Web hosting for a complete beginner, any suggestions?


jeff_rivera5

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So one of my new years resolutions was to put up a website with some

of my photos. Here it is Febuary 10th and I've done NOTHING!

Anyway, I'm looking for the idiots version of web site building.

Any company's catering to neophyte web masters? I'd want to post 25-

100 images at any time, plus have some pages for my own babel.

 

thanks,<div>007LbH-16577184.jpg.7a35883ffc814cdab1cf532873c34c25.jpg</div>

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if you are a microsoft office kinda guy, i think most web hosters can use your front page- built web pages. the pages are pretty what-you-see-is what-you-get, and the software has some handy features such as site cataloging and site mapping, both of which will help you with the maintenance and usability of your site. <br />

for free hosting, you really should read the fine print very very carefully. you may not own your images on the site. and if i'm not mistaken, photo.net is very much like this -- you surrender your copyright when you upload to photo.net. <br />

 

good luck,

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One possibility is to set up some folders on photo.net. The next step is to do some photo.net presentation pages which permit basic html design enhancement. The advantage of doing this is that someone else is responsible for site maintenance and takes care of things like formatting pages, creating thumbnails, etc. I maintain a small site for photo subjects of a rather specialized nature, but I really appreciate the opportunities photo.net provides for quick and easy display of my work to a wide audience.
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I don't believe that it is accurate to say that you give up your copyright to your material when it is uploaded to photo.net. Read the <a href="http://www.photo.net/terms-of-use">terms of use</a>. Its seems clear to me that photo.net is just setting some common sense ground rules about how the photos posted there will be displayed. Violating copyright would not be a winning strategy for attacting participants.
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Your nervousness, or lack of skills, has nothing to do with your choice of web hosting service. Build your website on your own hard drive using whichever method you wish. (Although FrontPage produces poor markup and Microsoft Office produces worse -- and this isn't an anti-Microsoft tirade, as OpenOffice is just as bad as MS Office here.) Make sure that it all works. Find a good hosting service. Any service that offers unlimited size, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited anything, or service for no charge should not be trusted. The hosting service is likely to let you upload via "ftp", and programs that handle ftp can make uploading as easy as (and very similar to) copying from your hard drive to another disk (and surely you can do that). Hosting services that don't offer you the moon but are very cheap may have more downtime than those that charge you a little more. I've been using http://www.pair.com/ for some time; it's fairly cheap without being very cheap, downtime is minimal, and I've been satisfied.
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you might want to think of this in terms of a two stage plan.

 

stage one

 

- using sites such as .mac or Mike's suggestion. There used to be a bunch of freebie type places to do what you are talking about. I started off with those.

 

stage two

 

- if you are going to keep on with this, you might want to consider getting your own domain name registered.

 

- use something like Dreamweaver, which allows one to manage Html, tables etc.

 

- use some kind of FTP program to upload your pages to your hosting web server

 

--- that is a little more involved, but gives you more control - once you own the domain name, not the case with a freebie site (Excite.com had a whole community software setup for photo albums - they eventually scaled back and removed those free communities and all was lost ) - so you can keep control and re situate your web site if necessary.

 

depends on how much you want to get into the nuts and bolts, you might hate it or take to it like the proverbial duck to h2o.

 

see www.bluetyger.ca - my website/magazine

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Some ISPs will offer you 5 to 10 megabytes of storage space for a personal Web page. As a beginner, you can do a lot with that amount.

 

Learn how to correctly downsize your photos, because displaying 400k photos on a Web site wastes space and bandwidth.

 

The photo you posted, for example, is nearly 200k. That photo can be half that size without degrading visual quality. Ten 200k photos is 2 megabytes. 100 photos of that size is 20 megabytes. That's a waste of space.

 

If you downsize your photos and limit them to about 100k at the most, that will help. And remember than not all of your users will be on a high-speed line. Trying to view a 200k file through dial-up is frustrating.

 

Keep that in mind when developing your site.

 

Microsoft FrontPage make it very easy to build a site. For the fancy features (counter, discussions, etc.), you need to get a Web host that supports FrontPage extensions. You can do the same through free counters and CGI scripts, but that probably is beyond your skills at the moment.<div>007Lg6-16577584.jpg.35391710af079035048a81a955d964b9.jpg</div>

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I mostly agree with Peter Evans - build it locally, and then upload the site files to a chosen host. I also agree that Frontpage, while possibly convenient, produces huge files with a lot of overhead. Worse, Frontpage sites aren't always portable across non-Microsoft borwsers. I can't tell you the number of times that Frontpage-built sites have crashed my PC.

 

I use the Coffee Cup HTML editor (www.coffeecup.com) for most of my site maintenance. It's inexpensive, reasonably intuitive and easy to use in creating straight HTML (including tables), allows previewing the result, and allows multiple browser testing options.

 

As to hosts, pair.com has a good reputation for being a well-managed hosting service. Things to look for or compare: storage and bandwidth charges; the ability to link from external pages (in web-speak, "external references" - like posting here or on other forums). Many of the free or very-inexpensive sites don't allow external references, as they want viewers to see their ads. Regardless of which host you eventually select, don't rely 100% on them for backups. Keep up-to-date backups of the whole site yourself.

 

If you plan to use the site for professional business development, having your own domain is a big plus. That also insulates you, to a degree, from being identified with a specific hosting service.

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Let me be clear about this:<P>

<b><font size=5>You do NOT give up your copyright by posting images to Photo.net.</b></font><P>Read the "Terms of Use", it's all explained. Or search on the "Site Feedback" forum. This has all been covered MANY times before.

<P>

As for websites, it all depends on how much you want to spend and what you want to achieve. If you just want to have a place to store your images and show them to some friends, there are lots of cheap hosting places out there. Some as cheap as $1 a month. But many of these have banner ads or give you a subdomain (www.photo.josh.net or something like that). And who knows, some may actually require you to give up your copyright.

<P>

I would look to pay $5 a month for hosting. That's what I pay for two different sites I have. The service is steady, the uptime is great (as far as I can tell) and their customer service is decent. I use Dreamweaver to make my webpages and then a shareware FTP program to upload them.

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I now host my own site on a Linux box out of my basement, but before that I used <a href="http://www.your-site.com">Your-Site</a> for around $5/month. You do need a domain name, though. <a href="http://www.gandi.net">Gandi.net</a> lets you register them for 12 Euros a year, or you can use <a href="http://www.godaddy.com">Godaddy</a> if you'd prefer a US registrar. Of course, you could easily pay $35/year and go with the two titans <a href="http://www.netsol.com">Network Solutions</a> or <a href="http://www.register.com">Register.com</a>. One benefit to your own domain is you can have an email that never changes regardless of who provides your internet access, too.
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