Making a website

[Randall Cooper]

Ok, I dont know if I put this in the wrong spot or not, so mods, feel free to move if necessary.

I'm in the process of making my own website, the first one I have ever made. I just have a few questions. What sites would you recommend for creating my first website, which ones have the best deals, etc.? And secondly, any website names you can suggest? I was thinking about Tornado Central, but it seemed to generic to me. any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Dennis Sherrod]

Best pricing, support, and service. Owned and operated by one of the ST members here.

http://drylinehosting.com/

 

[Jason Boggs]

Tornadocentral.com is already taken by our very own Jeff Snyder.

 

[Steve Miller]

I'll second the Dryline Hosting plug and recommend you go with a middle of the road package or higher. If you do that you can design a site using tools supplied through the hosting package. For example, my site is designed with Joomla.
Best of luck to you.

 

[Aaron Wesson]

I would get a pay host. Free host are garbage and well give you no power to make your site POP.

Most people want to make a site quickly.
SubDreamer, WordPress, e107 and such are good ways to do this. I wouldn't reccomend Joomla IMHO I hate this CMS.
I prefer SD or WP. SD cost but you get what you pay for. I currently own 17 licenses of this program. Word Press is a blog setup that you can get from their site wordpress.com or you can download and install your own blog using their FREE software from wordpress.org

If you go paid host they most likely will include a URL of your choice if it is not taken. They will also setup the DNS entries for you along with your Mail and such.

I purchase all of my sites from http://www.godaddy.com Since I have my own server I manually edit the dns entries and such.

So dont go free unless it is WordPress. Stay away from google, geocities, yahoo, aol and other free website builders.

 

[Randall Cooper]

ok, I went with Dryline Hosting, but I am having trouble knowing what to do next. I want to creat my website, how do I go about doing it? Anybody?

 

[Dennis Sherrod]

ok, I went with Dryline Hosting, but I am having trouble knowing what to do next. I want to creat my website, how do I go about doing it? Anybody?

Randall,
Justs sent you a PM with some info that may help.

 

[Randall Cooper]

dennis, i didnt get any links in the pm.

 

[David Drummond]

I got your signup invoice for the domain name just now (cool name BTW). Did you want to get a hosting package for it as well? That would be your next step, which gives your space and bandwidth to build a website. Let me know by PM which one you want and I can modify your billing without you having to go through the signup again.

The most common package chasers get is the F3. With F2 and above you get Fantastico, which has all sorts of cools scripts (like the Joomla Steve mentioned) which lets you get a pretty cool site going pretty quick with a few clicks. Plus you can easily upgrade later if you need more space/bandwith.

Wordpress was mentioned and it's one of the scripts that can be installed through Fantastico and it's easy to use and great if your looking for something more casual to have a place to just talk about chasing and stuff and throw up an occasional pic. If you want t to build out a more robust site, you would want to go with something else other than blog software. The nice thing about blogs is that google loves them!

Also in Fantastico we have Templates Express that will essentially drop a template on your space there and you can get the files and edit them how you want.

Along those lines, we have an actually site builder I am trying hard to get rolled out by the end of this month, although I haven't officially announced it yet.

 

[Dennis Sherrod]

Along those lines, we have an actually site builder I am trying hard to get rolled out by the end of this month, although I haven't officially announced it yet.

I think you just unofficially did David! Good addition.

 

[David Drummond]

I think you just unofficially did David! Good addition.

Eh, guess I did, didn't I. A few new changes coming very soon actually. That site builder is pretty cool. You can even try it out for free and build a site, then if you decide you want to keep it you have the option to sign up and have it switched to a live account.

 

[Darin Brunin]

Best pricing, support, and service. Owned and operated by one of the ST members here.

http://drylinehosting.com/

1) Pricing...I don't think so. Not to be a spoiler but I if I can get 10 gigs of storage and 300GB of bandwidth a month on my plan from another provider compared to 175mb and 5 gigs of bandwidth a month from Dryline for the same price it's a no brainer for me from that aspect of which hosting company I should choose.

2) David does give very good support and I am not even a customer of his and he provided some very good insight to helping out with some problems I had with Joomla. He has been working with Joomla for several years and is very knowledgeable on the CMS. He is also only a private message away on here as well to get ahold of with any other problems that you might have.

3) From anything that I have ever heard...David will go out of his way to make your service very good and help you out with any problems as listed above so I would recommend this aspect of his hosting company as well.

For the amount of material I have on my hosting account...I would be paying $50 a month for Dryline compared to the $5 a month I pay for GoDaddy. I would like to help David out and get his hosting but just can't justify spending the extra $540 a year to do so.

I'll second the Dryline Hosting plug and recommend you go with a middle of the road package or higher. If you do that you can design a site using tools supplied through the hosting package. For example, my site is designed with Joomla.
Best of luck to you.

You don't need a high end package from any hosting company to get Joomla. It's open source and can be set up in 10 minutes if you know what you're doing or have someone to help you out. Just set up the database, upload the files, and go through the provided instructions.

Really it all comes down to whether you might want to go with a Walmart type hosting company like GoDaddy or an organic food heathstore like Dryline. The service will be better with the small store but can you justify spending more to help the mom and pop store when Walmart has the goods for a 10th of the price? Not in my opinion.

Now some people won't like all of that above but that's my honest opinion and believe me...I have thought it out several times and have tried to convince myself to switch to Dryline but don't see the benefit of doing so at this time.

David is a good guy though and will do everything he can to help you out if you are just starting out designing a website so that will be your benefit of signing up with him Randall.

 

[David Drummond]

I for one appreciate the opinion Darin. When we started out with Dryline Hosting, we never intended to be the cheapest, get it all for a couple of bucks, web host.

I had plenty of those packages myself prior to DH and inevitably there were unacceptable problems. What often happens is the servers are overstuffed with customers to the point they start lagging or crashing or any other of a host of issues.

A web hosting company cannot make a server profitable selling ungodly amounts of drive space for essentially pennies. Why? Because hard drives are not unlimited in size and individual servers can only handle so much traffic. And it's not just the server they have to pay for. Out of that $5.00, credit card processors take a chunk, something has to go to your support people, server monitoring services, SSL certificates, etc etc etc. So in many cases they either end up being a host with many, many problems, or they go out of business.

In the case of GoDaddy, from what I hear there aren't that many problems with the hosting. They use web hosting as a loss leader, meaning they don't make a profit off the hosting but off the other services. If you ever buy anything there and go through the checkout you will understand what I mean. You have to click through 3 or 4 pages of things declining them just to by a domain name. They count on the upsells to pay the bills, and I guess it's working for them.

As I said, we know we aren't the cheapest, and we never intended to be. We did however intend to be GOOD at what we do, and communicate regularly with our customers. As all the things you mentioned, that is the added value of hosting with Dryline Hosting. No one will ever be just a customer number with us. I expect anyone on my staff to treat everyone just like they want to be treated. It's my promise to everyone that it will ALWAYS remain that way as long as I have anything to do with it.

We have also taken steps to streamline servers to work better with the types of websites that photographers and storm chasers most often have. Heavy on the pictures and videos. Right now our primary niche market is storm chasers, photographers, and artists.

There are also things like, I have had some chasers contact me that were going through some financial difficulties, but didn't want their site deleted if they closed their accounts. I worked with them on it, and we just put it suspended status for a few months, still preserving their account files until they were back on track again. In one case I did that for over a year. I can almost guarantee you that is something you won't get with just about any host unless you know someone.

I feel like we have succeeded in our goals. We are a debt free company, and 98% of all the customers that have signed up with us in the 6 years we have been in business are STILL with us, the vast majority are storm chasers. I feel like we must be doing something right. I continue to look for ways we can improve the service or add new features without compromising anything we currently have going on.

I'm currently working on a new site design, and we have some new things and services coming, but as always I am always open to hear input and suggestions on how we can improve things if needed.



Now, in regards to Joomla, you are correct, it's open source and if you have the skill you can install it on just about any host account that you have that allows you a MySQL database. I think that is why Steve recommended the middle packages because our F0 and F1 package does not have the databases on them. We also have something called Fantastico (many hosts have this) that allows simple installation of a full Joomla setup with a couple of clicks in as many minutes.

 

[Dennis Sherrod]

1) Pricing...I don't think so. Not to be a spoiler but I if I can get 10 gigs of storage and 300GB of bandwidth a month on my plan from another provider compared to 175mb and 5 gigs of bandwidth a month from Dryline for the same price it's a no brainer for me from that aspect of which hosting company I should choose.

I understand what you are saying, but there is a difference in best pricing and lowest pricing. At least as far as I am concerned.
There are many things you may get at a lower price, but may not be worth it. Sort of like cell phone coverage. Some companies have lower pricing, but the quality, uptime, coverage, and strength of the service may not be up to par as something you may want.
So to me, while I may get a few dollars lower cost somewhere, I would rather pay to have the quality uptime and others plus services than just save a few bucks and have problems. In the end, you pay for what you get and I am happy to spend a couple dollars more for something superior.

 

[Darin Brunin]

I had plenty of those packages myself prior to DH and inevitably there were unacceptable problems. What often happens is the servers are overstuffed with customers to the point they start lagging or crashing or any other of a host of issues.

You're right...sometimes with GoDaddy there is some server lag and it can get a little frustrating. The other downfall with them is they don't allow you to use some php functions which can get frustrating when you are trying to call in data from other servers.

Randall, if I were you I would skip trying to do a website from scratch with simple html unless you know it already. Joomla, Wordpress, or any other web platform that you can control from an easy content adding interface will make your website's look and content a lot easier to control.

I am using Joomla with a blogging component that is based off of Wordpress so I can get the power of Joomla with the blogging feature of Wordpress into one cookie and I am happy so far.