Official Luthiers Forum!

At this point I know nothing about setting up a website and I am trying to read up and learn about it. For those of you with websites, who have you chosen to host your sites? ...and who did you go to to register your domain name?
Thanks,
Steve

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Steve Sollod (pronounced sorta like "Solid")
www.swiftcreekguitars.com

I use http://www.mydomain.com/. I can not say it is better than others like godaddy or even getting a Word Press site on one of the cloud services. I just started with them 10 years ago for domain registration, and as it was easy to use them to host my site when I moved from my own servers. I have liked them. They have through the years improved both their software and have stayed on good hardware. Also when I have had issue I have been able to talk with real people. They offer both domain registration and hosting. Most of the hoster do both. Not a big deal but you do not have to deal with the name servers if your host also manages your domain.

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http://www.Harvestmoonguitars.com

I use moonfruit, the free option for a model soldier society that I am treasurer of. Here is the link if you want a look at what you do for free. Yiu do need to pay for a domain name bu Moonfruit is about £12 for 2 years. Very easy to sue and also has online tutorials. Also a link to the main Moonfruit home page.

http://www.bmssbristol.org.uk


http://www.moonfruit.com/

Cheers, Bob

Why would you need to sue them?

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

I think "sue" is an alternate spelling of use.

Alex

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"Indecision is the key to flexibility" .... Bumper sticker

I "sue" dreamhost.com for everything....very happy long-time customer!

Dave F.

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Cambrian Guitars

"There goes Mister Tic-Tac out the back with some bric-brac from the knick-knack rack"

I use GoDaddy for domain reg as well as hosting. There web site builder is pretty easy to get a simple site set up in a short period of time. Although I do know how to write and set up my own web page and forum and maintained my own 3D modeling forum for about 10 years when it came to setting up my business I just wanted easy and maintenance free so I chose to go with GoDaddy for everything. I don't think it gets much easier.

Bob

I used Yahoo web builder for both domain and site. There was a slight learning curve for me, but ended up working fine.

Chuck

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One of the best web-site building programs for the money is made by Serif and called Web_plus. ( usually around $100 ) It doesn't take a lot of technical savy to build with Web-Plus and Serif also has hosting...... WYSIWYG

Blessings,

Kevin

avoid one on one hosting
bold print giveth fine print taketh away

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John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

Hi Steve,
We have used Yahoo Merchant Services for many years now (Kenneth Michael Guitars) Site Builder is the very their friendly DIY software, but I've found the techs to be very helpful at all hours of the day or night when we hit a speed bump. Yahoo will also secure your domain name/s. There are gobs of on line tutors as well, including Youtube videos from Yahoo and others. Setting up your store front (if that's what you'd like to do) is fairly simple as well. We use host Gator for a few other things including our forum but they do not have the depth of Yahoo. Again I have found Yahoo support to be very good and would suggest you contact them to help you decide. Of course there are others that are very good too -- but I would avoid the small time operators.

Ken

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Ken Cierp

http://www.kennethmichaelguitars.com/

John,
Can you elaborate on that as I'm not even sure what "hosting" means.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2

fwiw, i suggest directNIC for dns registration. no bs, no fine print, no weird "deals". they are who everybody else in the US resells for. why pay a middle man?

keep in mind though that if you are like one day late in renewing your domain, (with whomever) your registrar will more then likely register it for themselves and then try ransom it back to you for considerably more.

I started with Jumpline.com over 20 years ago, and have stayed with them. I never have to worry about any of my domain names(4), and they just bill my CC for the service. Outstanding customer service, and you can talk to real people who speak english quite well. My one subscription can host up to 5 web sites with their own domain names, not sub-domains.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

Gator and Yahoo automatically renew -- other sleaze bags will send emails and regular mail near renewal time trying to get you to sign with them claiming some sort of emergency situation or faking that they are your current provider -- beware!

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Ken Cierp

http://www.kennethmichaelguitars.com/

Weebly is good and totally free if you don't mind having a www.???.weebly.com domain name. The web editor is really easy to use for anyone too and fairly flexible - easy to make a professional looking website.

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"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
Pablo Picasso

https://www.facebook.com/FenskeGuitars

Tempus fugit.....but not that fast Waddy!!

The internet (http servers and HTML code) didn't really take off until the Interop show in January 1993.
I put up website #92 for that show. Your hosting service didn't get started until 1997, that is, 17 years ago max. No biggie though

Cheers,
Dave F.

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Cambrian Guitars

"There goes Mister Tic-Tac out the back with some bric-brac from the knick-knack rack"

I guess that's right, Dave. It just feels like 20 years!
I started my Headhunting business on my own in 1996 and it was probably the next year that I started looking into web stuff.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

one on one is a hosting company not unlike godaddy
the service is terrible and when you go to cancel , they have a cancellation fee that they don't tell you about ,it is in the real fine print.

Hosting is a web service to help build websites

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John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

i used to work in internet marketing and my wife does now. you really gotta have a .com or a .net. search engine ranking is optimized for it and nobody can remember a funky titled sub-domain. something like:

(your name here).com
(your name guitars here).com
(your name luthier here).com
(your company name here).com
etc...

imo, if you're in business to earn a profit then buy a top level domain and rent a host. it's that simple. for the same price as a couple of spruce billets (per year), it's the cost of doing internet commerce and a declarable expense.

also, if web site design is proving formidable, consider using blog software and an attractive skin.

fwiw,
hosting is not a website building service per se' unless you're paying them for website development. basic hosting is renting space on a server, in a server farm, with a decent pipeline to a decent backbone (hopefully), who will store your internet content, webpages, etc.. and serve them to the public when your url is typed into a browser.

in a host look for (among other things):
-decent bandwidth and storage. hopefully you're not trying to stream feature film presentations, but be clear on what the bandwidth limitations are and what fees will incur should you somehow go over.
-redundancy. does your host have back-up servers to pick up should your server crash?
-if you are in the usa, look for a central location if possible. a server farm based in say new york, may timeout your url when typed in from california. use one of the online resources and ping their dns from multiple locations and compare response times.
-quick response from their nic for your trouble ticket. if nothing's been done to resolve the issues or no communication has happened in 24 hours, and this happens three times, consider moving to a new host



p.s. i just edited out some heinous typos -sorry

Responding to your initial question, I have used bluehost, eleven2, and arvixe in the past for shared hosting. With each provider, I spent some time researching services before I landed on each of the three. I had good support from and would recommend eleven2 and arvixe. I am currently using arvixe due to a 50% off for life deal during the holidays. In the end, they seem to all use cPanel or some derivation of it for managing hosting. I use ftp/ssh to get most things done, so I don't actually notice a different during day-to-day operations.

Now for more of a word of caution:

Four or five years ago I had an itch to start a business and figured I should build a webpage. I quickly got lost in the server-side of things, and for me "learning about web stuff" turned in to how to chmod permissions on folder hierarchies, then learning php, then thinking I should code a CMS that is easier to use than Wordpress.

Using your own hosting instead of a more "turnkey" service like weebly or wordpress.com has two costs. The first is the obvious yearly monetary expense. The second is the time. The second will almost always be more expensive than the first. Even once you get the site up and everything where you want it, you might have a little nagging doubt in the back of you mind about security. So you'll google "Wordpress Security" and 10 hours later realize there may about a million holes in your installation of Wordpress. Or are they holes?...now you're on to a philosophical debate about what security should be and really, really far from where you started without moving anywhere.

So, learning about these things is interesting. But if you're priority is building guitars, or even developing friendships in forums, then reading up and learning about web stuff can be a black hole with little return. Always keep asking "what is the end goal?" If an html/css static web page on a shared host will work, great. Having a blog, displaying beautiful photo galleries, ecommerce...even having interesting fonts, these all have cost in time and/or money to understand and implement.

You make it sound like a daunting task... I have no interest in more complicated things like selling items on-line. I just want to have a site that tells about me and my guitars and shows some of my work. Isn't there a relatively easy way to accomplish this?

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Steve Sollod (pronounced sorta like "Solid")
www.swiftcreekguitars.com

+1 for weebly.com

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guitarsbygiltzow.com

A facebook page seems to be the way a lot of people are doing it these days. Thats certainly the cheapest and easiest way of doing it and it doesn't look unprofessional either.

Sent from my GT-S5830 using Tapatalk 2

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"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
Pablo Picasso

https://www.facebook.com/FenskeGuitars