January 29, 2008

Two weeks have passed, give or take a day since the birth of my new website obsession. I have spent close to 80 hours on this project, mostly on research and plain old learning. I found myself wondering last night, how many other people are pondering the merits of 30GB of band width versus 30MB while kneading pizza dough in their kitchen? I bet it is more that you might think. With the Internet becoming increasingly vital to the average person's daily existence, more and more of us realize that continuing to rely solely on computer “nerds” and “geeks” will only barely keep us e-breathing.  In order to grow and prosper we must wean ourselves off technical life support bring ourselves up to speed with the science and the technology of the Internet.

Free Web Hosting is for Lightweights?

This is not strictly true; but, even though I am a novice I already find that my free web host cannot do all that I need it to do for the long term. ( “No, duh.” would be the appropriate response from an educated web professional.) While free web hosting is nicely adequate for many brochure style websites, for more casual bloggers, or for just-for-fun sites; the nature of my planned site (frequently changing page content, photos, videos, forum, blog, automatic email updates) will place too much demand on the limited flexibility and power of free web hosting. Additionally, I want a very clean look for my site and seamless functioning of all my site features. I find achieving this to be very difficult with my free web host putting their insignia all over my site and limiting the amount of screen space I may use. And, let's not forget the business part of this venture - my ads that are eventually supposed to pay for all this. If my site is going to have ads, I want them to be ads that I place on my pages, not my web host's ads. Anyway, I need a slightly brawnier hosting plan. So, I am shopping around.

The array of enterprising outfits just waiting to give my site a new home for a small monthly fee is astounding. So, I look to other sites to rate and review the hosting services. The rating sites are slightly fewer in number, but just as varied. I hardly find the same hosting company rated by more than one reviewer. And, those that are noticed by more than one reviewer get ratings so disparate as to make them almost useless to me. So, should I find someone who will review and rate the reviewers? All this seems at first profoundly silly, but actually it is just an indicator or how fast Internet options proliferate and how competitive the industry is. I persist in reading review after review and soon the opinions and information begin to become more cohesive. Here in this paragraph I have linked to several reviewing sites, but you should do a search and find and read more.

By now I have spent the better part of two days absorbing data on disc space, band width, up-time, support reliability, server platforms, shared hosting, dedicated servers, reseller hosting... the list goes on. In the end, I find my attention settling on just a few hosting services (HostGator, StartLogic, BlueHost, ANHosting and HostMonster) that seem to be recognized a bit more than the others and that are consistently reviewed well. It is true that this may be a function of marketing more than actual virtue of the service, but with a standard recognized name I can be assured of a basic level of quality. And, I have become acquainted with some of the basic features on a very rudimentary level; and this is good enough for me to make a commitment to a low cost hosting service. (There are several other high quality services I found intriguing but did not list here only because their packages did not quite suite my particular needs.)

Most web hosting services offer a money back guarantee period. 30 days is typical. A couple extend their guarantee period to a year, though this is unusual. Most services require a commitment of six months to a year, with longer contracts available. A few offer month to month service, or two to three month terms. The shorter the term, the greater the monthly cost, which ranges from around $3/month to $25/month. I'm looking in the $6 to $7/month range, and I am willing to commit to a year, knowing full well I am very unlikely to move my site within that time period unless the service is abominable. Besides, given my inexperience, a year is not too long a time to allow myself to develop a deeper understanding of web hosting features in general.

In the course of my research I happened upon a site that offers, in addition to a few hosting service reviews an abundance of super information(click here) for the newbie. Here you will find small bits of advice on web design, HTML, graphics and more. All this is presented in a way that is easy for a beginner like me to understand.

I hope to decide on a plan by the beginning of next week. In the meantime, I am working with the service that I have, but I am reluctant to invest much more energy in designing web pages I hate! I do it only because I now have a few people looking at them.

Adsense Update:

That is the good news! A few people, (yes that is YOU!) are looking at my websites. For those of you who are interested in the potential profitability of Adsense ads: My bottom line is looking a little better, but enormous room for growth remains: My income to date from ads is now $4.18, giving me a net capital loss of $49.82. It breaks down like this:

• 2 domain names (I could have paid less!)                       ($42.00)
  
• 2 additional domain names I had to
  buy because of trademark issues with the first names:      ( 12.00)
  
• Income from ads, to date                                                    4.18
                                                                                        _________
  Net Loss                                                                       ($49.82)

This is no cause for despair. It is normal. I did not expect instant site traffic with thousands of clicks on my ads. I did expect to put in a lot of time refining my site concept, blogging about it, posting articles where possible, and otherwise spreading the word about my project. One has to approach this just like any other job – with an objective in mind, a plan, and perseverance.

Next time:

• Settling on a new hosting plan?
• Blogging
• Page Design
• Adsense Update

Your newbie web developer,

Margaret Doran