If there's one question I'm asked more often than any other, it's probably "how can I stop getting spam emails?" But the next one down the list is undoubtedly "how do I get my own website and my own domain name up and running?" Now, there's no paucity of information online on this topic, or indeed a shortage of companies willing to do it for you in exchange for a fee. But the sheer level of exploitation of confused punters by certain so-called web-hosting companies is staggering. I say "so-called", because many of them aren't doing any hosting at all. They're paying some other company for some server space, they're renting a minuscule part of that out to you at a vastly marked-up price, they maintain control of all the settings, and you remain absolutely beholden to them until they agree to surrender control of the domain name to you for some absurd fee. A friend of mine has just got shafted this week by another one of these cowboys who are trying to charge him 50 quid for approximately 10 seconds of work, and I've had enough. Ignore what anyone else tells you: this is the trouble-free way of doing it.
1. You want to buy a domain name, right? Do not go to your ISP. Do not go to a fly-by-night company trumpeting how cheaply they can do it. Certainly don't take up an offer that says you can have one for free – it'll only mean pain further down the line. Go direct to one of the big players: perhaps UK Reg, perhaps FreeParking (my own choice), or maybe NamesCo. Domains ending in .com, .net, .org, .biz and .info should only cost around £15 to register for two years; .co.uk should be around a tenner for the same length of time. That doesn't get you a website; it just gives you ownership of that domain name for that period. When the time comes to renew, the service will email you to remind you. If you want to let it go, you can let it go. It's totally up to you.
2. Now you own the domain, you need to shop around for a web hosting service. You won't be tied in to any particular service for eternity; you can switch between a deal offered by a provider in Los Angeles, a deal offered by a friend of yours, a deal with the same people you bought the domain from, or indeed a deal offered by your ISP – just by changing the Name Server settings for that domain; that just means going to the website of the service you bought the domain from, logging in to your control panel, and filling in a couple of fields with the correct server name - such as ns1.xxxxxx.com, or ns2.xxxxxx.com. Within a few hours (often just a few minutes) web traffic looking for your domain will be directed to the new server. It's painless, it's easy, and does NOT warrant some exorbitant charge to arrange it.
3. That web hosting service you've chosen should not be expensive, unless you're a company planning on attracting a colossal amount of traffic. Of course, we all want people visiting our websites, but let's face it – the vast, vast majority of them, including my own, are vanity projects that will never put a webserver under any meaningful strain. To give you an idea, I have an account with Dreamhost which costs me around £150 per year. Dreamhosts's model is known as "shared hosting"; their deal allows me to host an unlimited number of websites – there's probably about 35 domains set up for various friends, family and bands on there at the moment – but I'm barely using 2% of my allotted disk space, and less than 1% of my allocated bandwidth every month. In the world of web-hosting, me and my friends are a total insignificance. And if I were to share the cost equally between all the people who use my server space, they'd be paying me less than a fiver a year.
Of course, companies depending on their websites for the survival of their businesses will want to pay a decent sum for a dedicated hosting service, on the understanding that this amount of money will get them instant, tip-top customer support and zero downtime. But most of us are served perfectly well by the kind of service Dreamhost and the like provide. The problem is, there are thousands of middlemen who have set themselves up on shared hosting plans exactly as I have, but are then charging each additional customer £100 or more a year for something that actually costs them next to nothing to provide. Seriously: the biggest sum you should be paying out for this whole process is for someone to design the website for you. Everything else should be, in the grand scheme of things, peanuts.
The concept of having your own website and your own domain is seen by many as a black art. It's not. If you ever hear anyone pondering how on earth they're going to do it, just direct them to this blog post. Because I'm getting really depressed by the number of people being needlessly ripped off.
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surely the thing to do is ask them for £100 and THEN direct them to this blog post...
Posted by: CarsmileSteve | Monday, 13 October 2008 at 01:18 PM
Good advices, Rhodri, though not exactly sure what your point (1) about domain-name registration is driving at - you must know more sharks than me.
I've had trouble-free hobby-hosting with Lunarpages for years now, and for £50 a year includes all the hosting I can eat and a free domain name that they renew as long as I'm with 'em - but it's registered in my name, so I can do what I want with it.
So my advice to newbies would be to roll your 3 steps into one and check out Lunarpages and anyone offering the same. Where's the catch?
Posted by: Jerry Bakewell | Monday, 13 October 2008 at 04:05 PM
Jerry,
Problems arise all the time with people registering domains with a company, and then having no control over a) renewal, and b) any settings related to that domain. By keeping the registration seperate and dealing with a company whose main business is domain registration and, crucially, don't have a vested interest in getting you to sign up for expensive hosting packages, you're just playing it safer.
I'm sure Lunarpages are fine, and there are a lot of perfectly good companies out there who bundle it together with no problems. But it can be hard for to separate the sharks from the good guys.
Posted by: Rhodri Marsden | Monday, 13 October 2008 at 04:45 PM
For my own vanity site I guess I budget about £80 per year, domains and hosting included (three domains on one shared package, so less than £30 per site).
Generally when I set up a site for someone I tell them to think about roughly £60 for the first site, but only the domain charge for additional ones. And then I simply send them to a reputable host I use.
Now, I maintain a batch of sites for a regional press company in my real job. We have about 1.5million pages a month, spread over 10 master accounts. Some of these have more diskspace and bandwidth (for example we have a shared image server with 60gb per month), but I reckon overall the hosting for these is under £1000 per year (plus domain renewals at normal prices). This works out at just under £50 per site per year!
So I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments, if we can run a business with much higher than average page views on literally buttons, then 6 page contact website owners should be able to do the same very easily. And I've met plenty of resellers who would prefer that to be an unknown.
Posted by: WiredScience | Monday, 13 October 2008 at 09:56 PM