Web hosting options and input on .mac hosting

[feakbeak]

Hello, I used to frequent these forums but haven't been here in forever.

I'm getting married in the fall and we're looking to setup a website with information about the wedding. I've already registered the domain and bought DNS service for a year.

I currently host a website from my home just to run a phpbb board that me and my old college buddies use to keep in touch. I was considering trying to host the wedding website at home too but my upload speed isn't great and I'm noticing that pictures can be a little sluggish to load. Also I don't really know of a great way to run both sites with different domains off of my one IP address unless I do something clunky like running them off different ports or something. There may be more elegant solutions that I'm simply not aware of but I'd still have the upload speed issue.

So to make things easier and allow better load times since there will end up being a fair number of photos on the site I was considering having the site hosted elsewhere. The first two options off the top of my head was going with asmallorange that I've always heard good things about never used or trying out .mac.

I'm not sure what type of bandwidth to expect for this wedding site, I'm sure it won't be heavy obviously but I'm not sure if the tiny package from ASO would be enough or if I would need to go with the small package for $5/mo. The site will probably be up for close to a year so I'd be looking at $60 for ASO or $100 for .mac for a year and I could try out the other .mac features too.

I'm using iWeb to make it pretty since I'm completely unskilled at design work, so far I'm liking the tool. It might be fun to play with iWeb and some of the other features related to .mac like the photo album publishing, etc but for the wedding site specifically the .mac/iWeb integration isn't a big deal to me.

I was hoping to get feedback on how hosting is with these two options or any additional hosting suggestions you may have. The only specific question I have is related to using custom URLs with .mac. Has anyone had experience setting this up, is it easy to do? Does .mac handle DNS service for the domain or you do need to handle that separately?

Thanks for your time.

 

[scr1968]

Hello, I used to frequent these forums but haven't been here in forever.

I'm getting married in the fall and we're looking to setup a website with information about the wedding. I've already registered the domain and bought DNS service for a year.

I currently host a website from my home just to run a phpbb board that me and my old college buddies use to keep in touch. I was considering trying to host the wedding website at home too but my upload speed isn't great and I'm noticing that pictures can be a little sluggish to load. Also I don't really know of a great way to run both sites with different domains off of my one IP address unless I do something clunky like running them off different ports or something. There may be more elegant solutions that I'm simply not aware of but I'd still have the upload speed issue.

So to make things easier and allow better load times since there will end up being a fair number of photos on the site I was considering having the site hosted elsewhere. The first two options off the top of my head was going with asmallorange that I've always heard good things about never used or trying out .mac.

I'm not sure what type of bandwidth to expect for this wedding site, I'm sure it won't be heavy obviously but I'm not sure if the tiny package from ASO would be enough or if I would need to go with the small package for $5/mo. The site will probably be up for close to a year so I'd be looking at $60 for ASO or $100 for .mac for a year and I could try out the other .mac features too.

I'm using iWeb to make it pretty since I'm completely unskilled at design work, so far I'm liking the tool. It might be fun to play with iWeb and some of the other features related to .mac like the photo album publishing, etc but for the wedding site specifically the .mac/iWeb integration isn't a big deal to me.

I was hoping to get feedback on how hosting is with these two options or any additional hosting suggestions you may have. The only specific question I have is related to using custom URLs with .mac. Has anyone had experience setting this up, is it easy to do? Does .mac handle DNS service for the domain or you do need to handle that separately?

Thanks for your time.

I did this very same thing with ASO. I used iWeb to design my site, uploaded it to my .Mac account but used a custom URL. What you need to do is contact ASO support staff and tell them what you want to do and that you want to add a "CNAME." This is something they need to do and isn't available (or was not when I did it) in the user control panel. Then you need to do a custom domain setup within iWeb but it was very easy. Then when someone enters in your custom URL it actually displays the content from your .Mac account. It worked very well but I have since disabled the feature as I don't use iWeb anymore.

SCR

 

[feakbeak]

I did this very same thing with ASO. I used iWeb to design my site, uploaded it to my .Mac account but used a custom URL. What you need to do is contact ASO support staff and tell them what you want to do and that you want to add a "CNAME." This is something they need to do and isn't available (or was not when I did it) in the user control panel. Then you need to do a custom domain setup within iWeb but it was very easy. Then when someone enters in your custom URL it actually displays the content from your .Mac account. It worked very well but I have since disabled the feature as I don't use iWeb anymore.

SCR

Thanks for the info. I actually don't use ASO for anything right now. I have my domain registrations and DNS service through dyndns right now. Their control panel is rather robust so I'm assuming I could configure it through there but if not thanks for the tip on having the CNAME configured.