Please advise me on my webhosting needs

May 5, 2009 6:56 AM

Please advise me on my webhosting needs (with apologies for yet another question on the topic).

I know this is a very common topic on AskMefi, but since my needs are quite specific, I hope you'll forgive another question.

I'm an academic with some outside interests. So far, I've relied on my institution's IT services for hosting my professional and personal webpages, but now, for various reasons, I'd like to set up my own site. Here's what I'd like to host:

* Two WordPress blogs -- one on academic topics, one on travel.
* Academic homepages for me and my wife, with career information, cv, bibliography, online papers in pdf format, etc.
* Personal webpages for my children (with password protection).
* A personal homepage with details of my non-academic activities, including journalism, poetry, and fiction, with samples.
* A photography site, with a public section for art photos and a private section for family ones.

Ideally, I'd like to have all this under a single, personalized domain, though that's not absolutely essential.

I imagine the blogs would get a moderate amount of traffic. My existing institutionally hosted ones have a small but dedicated band of followers. (I don’t know the figures.) If the travel blog got a lot of traffic I might consider monetizing it. I don't know much about the tech side of webhosting and webpage creation, though I'm not scared of it and am willing to learn. I am based in Southern Europe, though I imagine a large proportion of my traffic would come from the US.

My basic question is this: Is it worth me paying for webhosting rather than using the various free services available? If the former, which company would you recommend? Bluehost looked good, but it I've seen reports that its service has got worse recently. If the latter, which free services would best? (I definitely don't want any ISP-imposed ads.)

Thank you for your time.

posted by kitfreeman to computers & internet (7 comments total)

You could do that at GKG.net for $50 a year. $10 for the domain and $40 for their economy hosting plan. I think you'd need to put the WP blogs on seperate domains though. You can buy a 2nd domain for $10 and use the same hosting account. I've got 5 or 6 seperate sites, all running individual WordPress installs, one a single $40 hosting account. It works great.

Disclaimer - I'm not associated with GKG in any manner other than as a happy customer. I'm sure you can do the same thing at about the same price at 50 other web hosts too.
posted by COD at 7:25 AM on May 5

I vote for BlueHost. Their installation wizard (called "SimpleScripts") will build the two WordPress automatically (don't forget to build them in different folders), as well as the gallery site and personal pages. By the way, I think you should design the photography site on a WordPress platform as well, possibly on the free template Gallery).

I don't need their service much, so I don't know if it worsen. But when I had a question they gave me a solution within two hours, much better than my other host. If I have to choose some cons, I would say their control panel is not very friendly, it looks very professional and business-like, but if you're used to FTP or other "cold" softwares, it's quite simple to manage. And I don't like their tendancy to push you to buy premium services, even in your control panel.

Still, as I said, I believe that's the best host for your needs. That said, If you're ready to consider another platform other than Wordpress, and if price is not an important factor, you could consider Typepad Pro. They are truly very user-friendly, and their service is admirable.
posted by dov at 7:29 AM on May 5

They're a big player but I've run much of my personal stuff off of dreamhost and I've been very happy with it. I run multiple domains (I use gmail however for my mail - mostly for the nicer web interface, this is a one click option with dreamhost).

It also has several one click installs for some CMS and blog systems (including wordpress) and its been dirt cheap.
posted by bitdamaged at 7:56 AM on May 5

Yes, I think it is worth it to pay for hosting. I'm currently at Dreamhost, and am satisfied with their service (although I'm letting Google handle my e-mail, something that Dreamhost facilitates). I'll second what bitdamaged says. It would be a doddle for you to set up, say kit.freeman.com/blog1, kit.freeman.com/blog2, wife.freeman.com, family.freeman.com, someotherdomain.com, and so on.

Almost any decent webhost these days would be able to handle most of that though, so the question comes down to price, reliability, and support. Dreamhost is about $100/yr without discounts (which are easy to obtain, at least for your first year), and I get the impression this is about par for course. In terms of reliability, I haven't had any downtime in recent memory, although my site did get hacked through a still-unidentified vulnerability last year. Then again, my site has gotten hacked at other webhosts as well. In terms of support, I've found Dreamhost to be pretty good: they blog about downtime, and when I've had an issue, they've usually had a helpful response within an hour or two, which is a lot better than some fly-by-night webhosts I've used.
posted by adamrice at 8:09 AM on May 5

I would strongly advise going for paid hosting. Not only would free hosting be much less flexible and less powerful, I think it would be very unprofessional for your academic sites. You won't need to be paying big bucks for a dedicated server or anything and hosting is very affordable these days.

For an actual host, I'd recommend Nearly Free Speech, especially if you're torn between free and paid hosts. They will handle your multiple sites with ease and can host it all under your own domain. I have found the support to be responsive and if you're technologically competent, I don't see the set-up being a problem.

The main benefit is that it's a pay as you go service so you only pay for what you actually use - there's no need to predict how much storage and traffic you'll need (this seems to be an unknown for you, especially related to the academic sites) so you won't waste money on overkill hosting plans or get hit by excess fees. I currently host about 5 sites with them and pay about $5/month - I could easily cut this down if I used less space. If you have high resolution images on your photography site, it might be worth hosting these elsewhere and just inlining them into your site.
posted by turkeyphant at 8:20 AM on May 5

I don't think you'll get everything that you want through a free web hosting service but it would be possible to use free services individually to parcel out what you want:

• Two blogs -- Wordpress.com, Blogspot, or other free blogging platform
• Academic homepages, personal homepage, personal webpages for my children -- Google Sites, Weebly, Wetpaint, or other free web creation software (many of these can be combined with your own domain or you can use a subdomain on their hosting plaform)
• A photography site -- Flickr account

These solutions have some inherent limits but the main advantage is that you don't have to worry about updating software or doing any maintenance on anything that's not your content.

If you feel comfortable registering domains and managing a hosting account (or are willing to learn how to do so), then having your own domain and a paid hosting account lets you consolidate everything, but it also means more complexity -- managing and updating multiple Wordpress installs, building the personal pages, building and maintaining a photo gallery system.

If that's your preference, then there are any number of shared hosting services that will fulfill your needs. Hostjury is a hosting review site that I refer to—their highest-rated US-based hosts are Hostgator, Dreamhost, and Liquid Web. For a shared hosting account that will satisfy your needs, you'll most likely be spending under $20/month.

I have worked on sites hosted on Bluehost and it will certainly do everything you describe in your post, though I personally dislike it for reasons that will probably not matter to you (I find CPanel annoying and they don't allow shell access by default).
posted by camcgee at 10:28 AM on May 5

Another vote for Dreamhost. I've got a few blogs and a website running on their own domains, but they're all on the same hosting plan. They do have some downtime, but they're inexpensive, good with customer service, and do things like give away unlimited bandwidth and disk space. They're carbon-neutral too, I believe.
posted by miniminimarket at 12:46 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]