17 May 2006

web design question

So I am totally new to this but just found out that www.nodbodaddies.com is available as a domain name so i am going to start designing a webpage. my first. so : how much bandwidth to start with as a minimum? how many gigs of storage as min? i dont have much money as we all dont...so help...also thinking of doing this through yahoo small business. any advice?
doug

4 comments:

Lance Olsen said...

For my website, I use Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting Starter with five gigs of storage space and two hundred gigs of bandwidth a month. That's more than enough, unless you're planning on storing huge amounts of huge files (movies, podcasts, audio files, etc.). I'm perfectly happy with it, and it's reasonably priced.

But since you're affliated with a university, you might want to visit computer services. There's a good chance you'll be able to use your university's server for free and set up what I think (help me out there, you digerati) is called a subdomain that would read www.nobodaddies.com on people's browsers. That's what FC2 does.

Anonymous said...

Hello Doug,
I agree with lance that it is worth a call or trip to your university computing services to see what they have to offer. If, however, they can't meet your needs or you prefer to keep things separate, there are some things to consider.
- Keep things small to begin with. It's unlikely that you will be generating massive amounts of traffic or storing monsterously large files from day one. Look for a hosting package that offers at least half a gig of storage and five or more gigs of transfer. That's even more than you are likely to need for a while.
- Make sure you can upgrade when the time comes. Most hosts will allow you to upgrade to more bandwidth and storage for no fee other than the additional monthly charge.
- Watch out for excess bandwidth charges. In case your site suddenly takes off, be sure that the host is going to work with you on bandwidth charges. Being slashdotted (a verb now?) is very flattering, but can be really expensive.
- Make sure the host supports the technology you plan to use. If you expect to have a relatively static site (no heavy scripts, databases, etc.) then you should be OK with just about any host that gives you FTP access.
- Verify that email and DNS hosting is included. Often it is not. DNS is the system that maps names to numbers on the Internet and is essential to get your nobodaddies.com to actually go somewhere. Email, too, has to be set up and you should ask how much storage you get for that (if it is separate from the web space) and whether you can access it through POP, IMAP and/or the web.
- Check into the tech support provided. If you have problems uploading your files or getting your email, will you have someone to call who can fix it? (They usually won't help you with actually creating your site, though.)
- Finally, check out pre-paying for a year of service. As long as it is a reputable host, you aren't going to get stuck with them dissapearing and you can often find hosting for only a few dollars a month by prepaying.

Hope that helps!

~Aaron W.

Trevor Dodge said...

I can't add anything to the technical expertise already offered by Aaron and Lance here, so I'll just say this:

YAY! IT'S DOUG RICE!

Davis Schneiderman said...

Speaking of web design--can anyone recommend someone to design an author web site? I'd like to set one up, but have no time or inclination to learn the coding myself....

Reply to me at dschneiderman@lakeforest.edu

Davis