Question: starting my own website

[Elrond39]

Now, I'm sure you all get this question quite often, but I figured I would ask anyway. (Yes, I've searched, but I was looking for more specific information)

I'm your average "plays guitar and writes some songs" kind of guy, and I'm looking into designing a website with iWeb. Now, the thing is, is there a good free solution for hosting that I could use effectively (have some songs posted... maybe 20Mb total)? I've done some looking, and most sites (when free) have very limited storage. I'm not necessarily looking for lots of bandwidth (only going to be my friends checking it out, anyway), just a nice, self-designed place to show off some stuff, get suggestions, requests, and the like (with the obligatory blog, and possibly photos.... all the typical iWeb stuff, then). If I'm going to be paying, how much should I expect (per month/year?)?

Right now I'm using myspace (oh the horror!) for my stuff, but it really bothers me in every single way. Ads, ugly, annoying peoples' friends-requests, etc etc.

Is it important where the host is physically situated? I live in Holland, and I'm wondering if I could have my site hosted out of country, or if there's specific rules/procedures/whatever which restrict me to staying within my own borders.

Also, once I've found a host: how easy is it to upload an iWeb-created site? And how about updating the site?

Thanks for all of the help, in advance!

 

[Kunimodi]

I'm your average "plays guitar and writes some songs" kind of guy, and I'm looking into designing a website with iWeb. Now, the thing is, is there a good free solution for hosting that I could use effectively (have some songs posted... maybe 20Mb total)? I've done some looking, and most sites (when free) have very limited storage. I'm not necessarily looking for lots of bandwidth (only going to be my friends checking it out, anyway), just a nice, self-designed place to show off some stuff, get suggestions, requests, and the like (with the obligatory blog, and possibly photos.... all the typical iWeb stuff, then). If I'm going to be paying, how much should I expect (per month/year?)?

Hi, Elrond39. I think Google Pages would be a good match for you. You can use it for free:
http://pages.google.com

Is it important where the host is physically situated? I live in Holland, and I'm wondering if I could have my site hosted out of country, or if there's specific rules/procedures/whatever which restrict me to staying within my own borders.

There are normally no laws that restrict a person from hosting a website outside of their country. I would be shocked to find that this wasn't the case for a progressive country like Holland.

Also, once I've found a host: how easy is it to upload an iWeb-created site? And how about updating the site?

This will be a bit of a pain as you'll have to manually upload each file. iWeb exports its projects as whole directories with quite a few files. This is ideal for FTPing to a site, but currently there is not FTP support with Google pages. If this functionality is important to you, the next step would be a shared hosting plan which start around 5 USD/month.

 

[Lau]

Is it important where the host is physically situated? I live in Holland, and I'm wondering if I could have my site hosted out of country, or if there's specific rules/procedures/whatever which restrict me to staying within my own borders.

Not at all — I host my sites on www.asmallorange.com in the US, and it works out much cheaper because of the exchange rate (I'm in the UK). A Small Orange also does a "Tiny" package, which I host three sites on for $25 a year, which sounds like it would be more than enough space and bandwidth for you. After looking into free hosting and similar, I decided that $25 (€19) a year was such a small amount to pay to have reliable ad-free hosting, as I'd assumed I would have had to pay a higher monthly fee.

 

[Elrond39]

Thanks Kunimodi and Lau for your help. I like the look of Google Pages from the short glance I've given it so far, great suggestion Kunimodi. As for ASmallOrange, how's their service and support, etc? Any adds or the like? And do you pay by credit-card? And it works well with iWeb (saved to directory, FTP upload)? Does ASO have a means of uploading via FTP, or should I look into a program for it (and if so, which is likely, which one would you recommend?)?

Once again, thanks to you two!

 

[Lau]

As for ASmallOrange, how's their service and support, etc? Any adds or the like? And do you pay by credit-card? And it works well with iWeb (saved to directory, FTP upload)? Does ASO have a means of uploading via FTP, or should I look into a program for it (and if so, which is likely, which one would you recommend?)?

Once again, thanks to you two!

Their support is excellent, and the servers are very rarely down. If you need support you email them, and I've always had a response within the hour whether I've flagged it as urgent or non-urgent. There are no ads, as that was something I really didn't want. I couldn't believe that some paid hosting still used ads! And yes, I pay by credit card.

I can't help you for sure about iWeb as I don't use it, but if you mean you save all the html, css and image files in a folder and then use FTP to upload it, yes, that will work. I use a program called Fetch which you can get a free educational licence for, and I've also heard good things about Cyberduck, which is free to everyone. There's some discussion of FTP programs here.
It might be worth checking with someone who uses iWeb that this will all work though, or have a search for some past threads on here about iWeb, as I'm not sure how it works.

 

[nightelf]

I host my site at Pronethosting.net, they are cheap and not bad. For USD 1.55/monthly you get:

- 150 MB web space
- 4000 MB transfer
- unlimited email
- unlimited MySQL
- PHP, Perl, SSH
- cPanel control panel
- webmail

The best thing is that they offer unlimited add-on domains. So you can have multiple sites hosted there without paying extra. So you could have 2 sites, one personal and the other with your songs.

Do not buy domains from hosting companies, avoid a headaches and buy the domains at a registrar like GoDaddy.com. Use coupons "RON" for 6.95 .COM domains or "MUGGLE" for 10% discount.

The country does not matter, the company is from Hungary, im from Panama, and the servers are in the US

I have never used iWeb, but you can connect to the FTP site either using Mac OS X, or Transmit (the best FTP program IMHO).

 

[SBT]

I host my site at Pronethosting.net, they are cheap and not bad. For USD 1.55/monthly you get:

- 150 MB web space
- 4000 MB transfer
- unlimited email
- unlimited MySQL
- PHP, Perl, SSH
- cPanel control panel
- webmail

The best thing is that they offer unlimited add-on domains. So you can have multiple sites hosted there without paying extra. So you could have 2 sites, one personal and the other with your songs.

Do not buy domains from hosting companies, avoid a headaches and buy the domains at a registrar like GoDaddy.com. Use coupons "RON" for 6.95 .COM domains or "MUGGLE" for 10% discount.

The country does not matter, the company is from Hungary, im from Panama, and the servers are in the US

I have never used iWeb, but you can connect to the FTP site either using Mac OS X, or Transmit (the best FTP program IMHO).

Yeh, well, Inspironhosting.com offer UNLIMITED EVERYTHING. Seriously. I saw some packages on eBay for as little as £2 a year. I pay £2 a month for the package with them and i can say: in the past few months it hasnt gone down.

 

[Elrond39]

I've pretty much narrowed down what i'm going to do (I'm giving a good, long look at ASmallOrange), but now I have a few more questions for those who use iWeb for their website.

How's the editing? That is to say, I can just edit things in iWeb, save it to the folder and upload via FTP, yes?
Also, can I add the option for comments to pages I've made with iWeb? When I save to a folder, iWeb tells me that comments are only available for .Mac, but I'm sure I've seen iWeb-made sites with comments-sections on them. Anyone know how this works out?

Thanks again to everyone who's helping me out!

 

[Ugg]

How's the editing? That is to say, I can just edit things in iWeb, save it to the folder and upload via FTP, yes?
Also, can I add the option for comments to pages I've made with iWeb? When I save to a folder, iWeb tells me that comments are only available for .Mac, but I'm sure I've seen iWeb-made sites with comments-sections on them. Anyone know how this works out?

Thanks again to everyone who's helping me out!

Comments and RSS feeds are only available when using dot mac. I think it's a ripoff but...

The editing is very easy and trouble free. However, you do have to load the entire site, you can't simply upload the new blog if all you've updated is your blog, you have to upload the whole site. I had a 10 mg movie that I had on my site and it was simply too much of a hassle so I removed it. It uploads a little better now but it's still slowish. I use Cyberduck as my ftp client and it works like a charm.

If you already have iWeb, you can create a site, save it and then open it up while it is still on your computer. I do this to make sure that it's working ok before I upload it. Also, another tip if you're going to be uploading a bunch of photos is to use the export to html utility in iPhoto. The pages load quicker than if you used the iWeb template and are just as nice looking.