Posted on 10/20/2014 1:12:15 PM PDT by Monterrosa-24
Register your domain at NameCheap, which is easy and very good. I’d host at Hostgator. Both are inexpensive and reliable.
Sounds like good advice. Bookmarking for later.
Bluhost sucks
I have them and they are terrible.
Just simply uploading files is the biggest pain in the @$$ with Bluhost
Uploading files using simple FTP is something every other web hosting company in the world has had since the mid 1990’s
Not *&#@ Bluhost. They used to have it, but they took it away and instead they require you to download & install 3rd party software (which includes registering your personnel information) that just doesn’t work right.
If you like to constantly configuring & creating FTP accounts by all means go with Bluhost. If you prefer simply and quickly load files and spend more time designing your website than trying to upload it than go with someone else
Oh and watch out for Bluhost’s sneaky 2 year auto renewal
F)*(@## them,
So the easiest website to set up is using Wix.com... they can also host with a fairly low monthly fee, set up email through google etc. They have templates you can choose for free and some pay... or at least the last time I used them that’s how it worked.
If you’re at all proficient with design, you can go the webflow route and set up your hosting through them.
If you want something truly unique... you can also hire someone for cheap off elance, to design it. Best of luck!
Take a look at HostGator, decent service and a nice price - probably less than $10 a month.
BlueHost is also good.
Stay away from hosting at GoDaddy - keep them for domain registrations and email.
bookmark
Are you on facebook? I would start with them. Upload your best representative photos and menus of your business. Let your customers know you are on facebook and to check for coupons and special deals there
Avoid Wix.com. It is junk. Volusion and BigCommerce use industry standard coding and will give your business a more professional presentation.
If you’re not a coder, the best platform I know for a simple site is at Weebly.com. Cheap, effective, and simple.
Namecheap
Weebly.com, like Wix.com, will not give you a professional looking website.
I have used them for more than a decade and agree.
It will give you the most professional looking site you can get without the services of a decent coder.
I agree that Wix stinks, but with Weebly you can make something that looks decent. At least good enough for a small local business.
I am a web developer and have run a small successful business since 1999. I am not going to mention my business name since I am not trying to promote it here, just wanting to give you the advice you requested.
I use my own dedicated servers for my clients because of the headaches, and problems at GoDaddy, as well as on many of the big commercial servers. Their business model is to cram thousands of websites on a server, assuming that they will not all be opened by viewers at the same time. Consequently their load time is slow but not too terribly slow until certain high column times. E-commerce stores will find that heavy shopping times, annoying to their visitors. Also email queues will be long so your mail will be slow going out and coming in. You run the risk of someone on your shared hosting IP sending spam and then all emails boxes on that shared IP are blacklisted for a few days, causing. Your mail to get rejected by people using mail filters.
There is a good reason that serious businesses do not host on goDaddy. Thus the casual ads they do, geared towards the masses of casual users who are their target.
So who to choose? My advice, NOT GoDaddy! Other than that, find a company that limits the sites they put on a server, to avoid overcrowding. Listen to people who have had good experiences, try it, and if problems crop up, move and try another. I finally gave up trying in 2002 and started using my own dedicated servers for my clients to avoid the problems.
Advice on doing your own site........ Use a WordPress platform, it has very good SEO ..... Search engine optimization ... built in, and you need SEO! There are free Wordpress templates available, or very nice ones for $60 or so dollars. If you can’t afford a custom site built by a professional developer, WordPress is the next best option. If you have trouble figuring out how to install and use WordPress, then I guess Wix ... www.wix.com .... Is okay.... Not great, but okay.
Bump for later and research
Some people forget to do so and when the host goes belly up or the client (you) want to move to a better service you find out you do not own the domain name. The name you spread around the internet promoting your product.
The price of a name is cheap like $10 a month or less. Always use a search engine to search and not a web host as they have been known to buy the domain seconds after you pass on it that moment. You find it for sale at a higher price a few minutes later.
Also have copies of all the website graphics and pages.
Never rely on the website creator or host to turn over the files.
Learn how to upload your website pages yourself. Also setting up the email accounts. Even if you have someone else do the work. It is not that hard. It becomes hard when something goes wrong and you cannot contact anyone.
You could fix most issues.
I use GoDaddy http://www.http://godaddy.com and to host my site I use LunarPages http://www.lunarpages.com
GoDaddy does try upselling you on all their pages. I recently had to pay my yearly fee for my domain names and it was irritating the number of attempts. Never had issues with LunarPages.
Again do not do a search for a domain name at these or similar sites or you will lose that name.
i use godaddy after starting with netsolutions. i had a local provider that i used for many years but they had problems with x-cart which i use. i like godaddy. you get a lot of advertising come ons but the service is excellent and i needed to recover from soemthing i messed up and the real live american person walked me thru it until i got the correct recovery version. first class customer service. they offer all the standard stuff mysql, wordpress, ssl which was easy to get working.
Let's agree that we have different standards. Mine are professional.
BTW, Weebly charges a 3% transaction fee.
A transaction fee for what?
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