Domain hosting/Website Building/Not Working

September 17, 2014 6:30 PM

I was working on a group project to build a simple website for a local business. Like a crazy person I assumed that once we finished the project it wouldn't take that much work to move the files to a hosting site and link from GoDaddy.

Now I'm regretting putting myself in charge of this. I have all the files, but I'm having difficulty getting the files into a position where I can see them and they look like their respective html and css. Currently, I'm working with it within Dropbox and I can forward the domain to the main html download page, but not the viewable page.

Once I get the site forwarding I was going to work on altering the file to pick up the new links to the pictures and style files. Right now I'm just trying to get the main link to the index html.

I'm not married to the Dropbox idea, I've tried Google Sites also, without any more luck.

Obviously, I really don't know what I'm doing here and no this is no longer a class project.

Please rest assured that this website is very unlikely to need more space or bandwidth than provided by any of the above solutions.

posted by aetg to Technology (10 answers total)

Dropbox doesn't really work for hosting. IF you have an account old enough to have a public folder, it sort of does, but not great, and newer accounts don't get the public folder without paying. Dropbox is intended for file sharing and they don't really mean for it to be a web host. Google Sites is, as far as I know, intended for stuff designed using their tool, not just hosting whatever you upload. If all this is ever going to have is HTML, CSS, and a few images, and you need to point a domain name to it--that's actually kind of a hard thing to find in "free" these days. There are tons of cheap options which are all pretty same-y, most of them use the same Cpanel interface, they're not always reliable but if it's a static site and you keep the files safely backed up you can just move if you need to. If you need free, you could learn how to use GitHub Pages, maybe, but that's going to require at least learning the basics of Git.
posted by Sequence at 6:39 PM on September 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Dropbox doesn't really work for hosting. IF you have an account old enough to have a public folder, it sort of does, but not great, and newer accounts don't get the public folder without paying.


So, having the link available to anyone with the address does not equal public? Because I do see the file, just not the actual view of the file if that makes sense.
posted by aetg at 6:46 PM on September 17, 2014

You're categorically not going to be able to use Dropbox for this. They won't serve the file(s) in a way that it's going to be rendered by web browsers properly. This is a deliberate move on their part, as they don't want to be a web host.

I honestly don't know of any free hosting setups. Google does reveal some, but they look super-scammy.

Can you afford (cheap) hosting? If so, A Small Orange's $35 a year plan might be all you need.

Sounds like you've got the domain via GoDaddy. What you'll probably want to do is to log onto GoDaddy, point the domain to your host's nameservers, and they should sort out the rest.

Then you just have to upload your files to their hosting area and you should be live.
posted by Magnakai at 6:51 PM on September 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Buy the cheapest GoDaddy hosting plan available. Put all the files in the public_html directory using either ftp or the file manager in the Go Daddy control panel. This assumes all the web site files are in the same directory. Follow Go Daddy's direction to configure the name servers properly.

That should be it.
posted by COD at 6:52 PM on September 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: So, it looks like I probably just need to dole out some cash. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount of money, but I'm basically doing this for free for someone so I hate to ask them to pay for it. I'll have to see what they think.
posted by aetg at 6:57 PM on September 17, 2014

As Sequence mentioned, Github Pages will host static sites for free.
posted by ludwig_van at 7:42 PM on September 17, 2014

Response by poster: Thank you everyone. I play around with Github pages and see if I can get it to work with the other files.
posted by aetg at 7:50 PM on September 17, 2014

If you've already got a domain through GoDaddy, you might have some free hosting included already.
posted by hydra77 at 7:58 PM on September 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

It might seem kind of daunting to get it set up, but you could also use Amazon S3 static websites. It's not literally free, but you pay for only the usage (storage used and requests), which I'd bet will be minuscule for something like this.
posted by primethyme at 9:01 PM on September 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

If you're setting it up for a business, then they should be able to afford $3/month for hosting. That's nothing.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 8:08 AM on September 18, 2014