Hi,
I want to start a business website.
Any advice on cheap or free places. It'll be a small business, so does geocities allow this?
Also - why can't I be my own server? Why do other people have to 'host' your site?

you could host your own website if you wanted... you would just need a web server, such as apache running on your PC, and the PC would have to be running 24/7 with a decent connection speed. You would also have to set up some sort of dynamic hostname from somewhere such as www.dyndns.com

there are plenty of free places out their for small web-sites, but they dont offer much, and they generally have annoying ads or pop-ups.

You can get some good web-hosting for about £50 a year including a domain.

the people I use for both my sites www.xafiers-home.com and www.sheffsingles.co.uk are www.friendlywebhost.com they're based in the US but with the exchange being so good lately its VERY cheap... and they offer a lot more bandwidth than anywhere else for the same price. :) very good hosting!

At the risk of starting a 'this hosting company is better than that hosting company', for a good example of what you can get for your money, try www.34sp.com - 1 year hosting is £15 (lots of disk space and transfer allowance, a database, 10 mail boxes, PHP, etc). A .com domain is £20 for 2 years, .co.uk domain is £10 for 2 years.

There are others at a similar price, but I'd highly recommend 34SP. Great customer service, even better price.

One thing I would recommend is getting professional help when designing your website. I believe that a bad website is worse than having none at all. There are plenty of people here that would happily check your website over.

If you want to host from your computer,.

Download Xxampp, its easy to use (apache,perl,php, phpmyadmin, mysql, all bundled into one) and even if you dont want to use your comp and use a host instead you can still use xampp to test your website in a live situation.

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

BTW I'm told its not a good idea to host using windows

Originally posted by LL200
There are others at a similar price, but I'd highly recommend 34SP. Great customer service, even better price.

they're MEGA expensive, their highest package only offers 200mb of space and 4000mb of data transfer per month! and thats £45! I pay £50ish a year and I get 500mb of space, 10Gb of data transfer, and more than 1 database... I pay £5 more for about 2 or 3x more :suspect:

Before people start suggesting hosts, meer hasn't exactly said what is required? More is not necessarily value for money.


What kind of website would you have planned (Static, just a straight forward html website) or a database driven website which changes all the time, and is likely to incorporate a shop, etc. and is most likely to want to use php and mysql. (If I have just lost you, I am assumming you want static)

Will you be requiring a business email address? Would you like this email address to be accesible via webmail if you want one?

What support would you like from your webhost?

Would you like to be able to see the site statistics from your website?

I would advise against running a business website from home, as it is not guaranteed to be 24/7.

I did my site on freeserve if you are wanting cheap and easy because its freeee. And mine is the best site in the world :D

heres mine- http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/Kays_site/image.jhtml
just type that into your toolbar :D

for the site making page its this http://www.wanadoo.co.uk/sitebuilder/mysite.htm?linkfrom=communicate_sitebuilder&link=fsHH_3_1Link1&article=COM_mysite_sitebuilder

ok :D

Originally posted by komal
I did my site on freeserve if you are wanting cheap and easy because its freeee. And mine is the best site in the world :D

heres mine- http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/Kays_site/image.jhtml
just type that into your toolbar :D

for the site making page its this http://www.wanadoo.co.uk/sitebuilder/mysite.htm?linkfrom=communicate_sitebuilder&link=fsHH_3_1Link1&article=COM_mysite_sitebuilder

ok :D



Look @ the URLs that you get for a "FREE" host.

Anybody with any sense will not buy from a website hosted on freeservers.


Bite the bullet. Reg a domain and get some proper hosting. If you're not able to pay, then you shouldn't be trying to run a business website.:loopy:

Have you found a webhost yet,

If you get stuck have a look at us www.glasstop.net

Hosting from £16.99 per year

Domains from £7.90 for 2 years



www.glasstop.net

try http//:www.freewebs .com (http://www.freewebs.com)

its excellent and free there are no adverts at all!!!!

freewebs is horribly unreliable


cheapest/most reliable domains (a lot of companies will try and charge you £80 after the initial 2 years) is www.ukreg.com

i would heartily recommend www.nearlyfreespeech.net if you're not planning on using too much bandwidth/diskspace

it costs $1 per gigabyte of b/w used (not done monthly)
and $0.01 per megabyte of space used per month.

I'd echo the point made that you should *definitely* avoid any free hosting. For a couple of quid a month you can get something decent - for the same reason it's not worth even thinking about hosting it yourself unless you're prepared to lose downtime when your ISP has problems, cope with a dynamic IP, etc etc. (in fact I'd be interested to know how many UK ISPs officially allow servers on their connections)

Bear in mind that if your site is small and doesn't have thousands of visitors a day, bandwidth useage may well be tiny. I was surprised at how little is generated by moderate numbers.

Personally I'd be more concerned about using a decent registration agent to buy the domain. Make sure you get one who will allow you to change DNS settings (so you can move hosting), or at the very least edit the nameserver entry so you can use your own DNS servers (eg ZoneEdit). I've been using [url=http://www.123-reg.co.uk[/url], who are now owned by Pipex, and am very happy with what they offer.

My site is hosted for nowt by Xi2.org (http://www.xi2.org)

PM a member here called March for further details, not sure of their prices but I'm sure they're fairly cheap, although their allocation of free hosting has ended, think I got one of their last free hosting deals.

AFAIK the hosting has all the trimmings of fancy hosting such as MySQL, PHP, Webmail and 100Mb of web space... As mentioned all the details are on the web site.

I hope this can be of help for you. Here is a good free web hosting provider I use- 000webhost.com

They provide free hosting, with absolutely no ads. You get 350 MB of disk space and 100 GB bandwidth, and my account was activated soon as I signed up. They also have a cPanel which makes it easy for me to manage my site.

You can register here http://www.000webhost.com/55892.html

Reading through this thread it's telling me "You get what you pay for".

I am a reseller for one of the worlds biggest hosts.

If you'd like discuss hosting from as little as $4.95 a month. I am sheffield-based and can talk you through the entire process.

Many thanks
Luke
VentCreative

You are 3 years too late Luke! Besides pricing in $$ for the UK crew is abit odd not to mention lame value for money!

ok, my 2pen'th...have a look at http://tech-hosts.co.uk

£1 per month, service has been very good.

My Mistake for not giving the GBP Equivalent.

For approximately £2.50 a month:

Multiple Domains - Unlimited
Disk Storage - Unlimited
1 Free Top Level Domain - Free for life
Dedicated IP Address
Unlimited Data Transfer
Unlimited Sub Domains
Free Site Builder
Free Award Winning 24/7 Support
Full Database Support
Ecommerce Ready

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, on the basic package.

I'm sure you'll agree that it is good value for money.

I did my site on freeserve if you are wanting cheap and easy because its freeee. And mine is the best site in the world :D

heres mine- http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/Kays_site/image.jhtml
just type that into your toolbar :D

for the site making page its this http://www.wanadoo.co.uk/sitebuilder/mysite.htm?linkfrom=communicate_sitebuilder&link=fsHH_3_1Link1&article=COM_mysite_sitebuilder

ok :D

Your sites THAT good it does not work.

:hihi::hihi::hihi::hihi::hihi:

Multiple Domains - Unlimited
Disk Storage - Unlimited
1 Free Top Level Domain - Free for life
Dedicated IP Address
Unlimited Data Transfer
Unlimited Sub Domains
Free Site Builder
Free Award Winning 24/7 Support
Full Database Support
Ecommerce Ready

Far too many "unlimiteds" in there:rolleyes:

Your sites THAT good it does not work.

:hihi::hihi::hihi::hihi::hihi:

A little copy & pasting reveals http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/Kays_site/ which is a framed site (even worse for a business site)

Your sites THAT good it does not work.

:hihi::hihi::hihi::hihi::hihi:

It probably did three and a half years ago when she made the post!

I run my current site from a Windows XP machine, using Abyss Web Server software, and its fine and totally FREE...Linking it via a dymanic IP address using NO IP.com (also free) I have my own 2000 GB server (nothing on it current site yet though)), on a fast 8Mb broadband connection.

It's fine, why throw money at pro hosting companies when you can do it for nothing.....there is no reason why your site should have any downtime at all, in fact in my experience LESS downtime than the pro providers!!! I had a site on a pro hosting service 23years ago that vanished for 3 days while they claimed 'slight technical problem with server upgrade'....3 DAYS!!!!!!!!! In running my own webserver (various web sites over the last 2 1/2 years) on a dedicated bog standard PC my downtime has been a total hours on 5 occasions due to adding more RAM, disk arrays, changing a graphics card, etc....it runs as a windows service so for example a re-boot of the machine lasting 70 seconds means just a downtime of 70 seconds!!!!!

make sure you have a business broadband package though as most domestic ones wont allow web servers run from home. Configuring the router is the hardest part in my experience, as many are not very user friendly, but so many web sites explain how to do this now its not too much of a chore.

Despite what some may say, I know a lot of people doing it this way and its great fun too and gives you a feeling of control over at least ONE corner of the WWW. This is NOT the way if you have a commercial site that gets 1000's of hits per day and uses an online store or various commercial modules, but for most users its fine.

No messing about with FTP software uploading modified files either, you just change the page and save, and its live!!!!

Try webHost, its free. I have several sites with Joomla installed and work fine.
What you will get :
- 350 MB of Disk Space, 100 GB Bandwidth
- Host your own domain
- cPanel Powered Hosting (you will love it)
- Over 500 website templates ready to download
- Easy to use website builder
- Free POP3 Email Box with Webmail access
- FTP and Web based File Manager
- PHP, MySQL, Perl, CGI, Ruby.
- And many more..
Try :

Hosting certainly good.
But not all there is good.
At them is affiliate program.
Here it is necessary to know.
A deceit!!!


____________________________________________
Rent Relief (http://www.taxpal.ie) Business Bookkeeping (http://www.sraccounting.ie)

try dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?441027). They are the best value hosting company around. I do website design for a living and have tried way over 20+ companys and have found these to be the best by far. Very low cost and virtually no bandwith or webspace restrictions.

I am only fairly new to this dns game, but in my opinion I would not trust a free company, and you are better going for one that you have to pay for, I'm sure you will be able to find one that is cheap enough.

I personally use BeTheHost as it is very cheap and reliable.
Even the reseller package is excellent!

I would also have said Jamroll - but they have gone bust and are closing next month :(

I use these

https://www.krystal.co.uk/

They are reasonably priced, dont oversell (thats is selling more space bandwidth than they actually have on the assumption that most wont use it all )

The support is second to none, the servers quick, and a great range of prices and facilities.

C

Your www.sheffsingles.co.uk and www.xafiers-home.com not working you could host your own website if you wanted... you would just need a web server, such as apache running on your PC, and the PC would have to be running 24/7 with a decent connection speed. You would also have to set up some sort of dynamic hostname from somewhere such as www.dyndns.com

there are plenty of free places out their for small web-sites, but they dont offer much, and they generally have annoying ads or pop-ups.

You can get some good web-hosting for about £50 a year including a domain.

the people I use for both my sites www.xafiers-home.com and www.sheffsingles.co.uk are www.friendlywebhost.com they're based in the US but with the exchange being so good lately its VERY cheap... and they offer a lot more bandwidth than anywhere else for the same price. :) very good hosting!

Deleted by me!

http://www.serif.com/webplus/?MC=SERPPCWP1&gclid=CKf707GF6J4CFSBk4wodgzD7JQ

best regards
swarfendor43

Deleted by me!

Serif don't do hosting though:confused:.

If you look carefully at the details of this program you will find that this is now an option that was not offered in previous incarnations!

check the features - scroll down and look on the left side:

http://www.serif.com/webplus/x4/feature-list/

best regards,
swarfendor43

Deleted by me!

Subdomains of webplus only though (not much good for a commercial site).

Hi sccsux,

Serif think differently (http://www.serif.com/business/create-websites/) and just found out that this is only for a year (wonder what the subsequent year's fees would be? Once in locked in? A bit like cable - good but you can't change your provider if Virgin/BlueYonder hosts your cable?

best regards,
swarfendor43