Green Sites

You cannot have an Internet presence unless your site is hosted somewhere.

DOMAIN NAMES

In the first place this means that you must buy a domain name. A ‘co.uk’ domain name costs in the region of £10 per year and is about the cheapest. Other top level domain names may cost more. In the United Kingdom you may also consider ‘.com’ for commercial sites, ‘.org’, if you happen to be a club or organisation. ‘.net’ is another possibility. You should see all the possible options – and there are many – when you are about to buy.

HOSTING

In general, I would suggest that you buy your domain name with the company that will host your site. This simplifies matters considerably.

Green Sites (Plymouth) insists that you buy your domain name in your own name.  Green-Sites will not buy and manage a domain name for you, though we will explain how you can do this yourself. In this way you always remain in control of your domain name.

You can – if you wish – pay for hosting, using a company like 1&1, whose stated goal is “to be first to market with innovative products at the most competitive prices – without compromising quality or reliability. 1&1 started as a pioneer and has never stopped working this way.”

However, many other providers offer highly competitive, quality  deals at a fraction of the cost or completely free. You do need to make careful comparisons rather than be influenced just by marketing.

Green Sites has had a working relationship with Webserver SK for a number of years and uses its services for issues related to advanced server and client-side coding. Webserver SK offers the following services:

Logo design £35

WebSite design only £55 (NOT A FUNCTIONAL SITE BUT A DRAFT)

Corporate pkg 2GB+5xSQL £120

Or full site design:

a) static web page (simple design+html), 10 html pages £200

b) dynamic web page + CMS (editable menus, pages, news) £600

c) dynamic web page + flash header/banners/animations £800

Other services

Extra coding per hour £1

Extra SQL DB £10

SSL Certificate £50

Regular domain name £10

Starter pkg 300MB £35

Business pkg 500MB+1xSQL £55

Please, contact Green Sites (Plymouth) in the first instance,  if you would like Webserver SK to undertake work for you.

On the other hand you may prefer completely FREE hosting with FreeVirtualServers or Doteasy.

FreeVirtualServers’ Free Hosting package is my personal choice for budget hosting. The enormous advantage is that it comes with the possibility of setting up numerous MySQL databases. Note that it is PHP and MySQL compatible, which means that it will work well with Wordpress, Drupal and other blog solutions. Here is a summary of the main features of the package:

Web Space -  100MB

Bandwidth per Month -  100MB

Commercial Use Allowed

 Email Accounts -  Unlimited

MySQL Databases -  Unlimited

Subdomains -  Unlimited

cPanel (Control Panel)

FTP accounts -  Unlimited

Free Online rvSiteBuilder Website Builder

Doteasy does not offer database support with its free hosting, so is completely useless with Wordpress, which requires a database, though fine if your site only uses HTML.  With its Basic free package Doteasy offers the following services:

100MB Hosting Storage (Web Space)

1GB Data Transfer (bandwidth)

10 Email Accounts

Host 10 Add-on Domains

For small business brochures or personal content, Doteasy’s  free web hosting plan simple and reliable and good value, but remember there is no database. Increased costs arise because site structure  involves hand-coding and an integrated stand-alone administration system like FCKeditor.

MICROSOFT OR OPEN-SOURCE?

The important point to realise about Wordpress is that it is PHP based and requires a MySQL database. Both of these are open-source and free in contrast to Microsoft, which charges for just about everything and uses ASP coding and a different format database.

If, for any reason, you prefer to stick with Microsoft, Wordpress is not the web site solution for you. But please note this comment on Colin Cochrane’s  blog:

“I tried some different ASP.NET blog engines such as dasBlog and subText, but found the markup that was rendered was not acceptable.  Then I came across BlogEngine.NET, which, I was thrilled to discover, met all of my requirements.  It’s light weight, very easy to set up, and is very well-designed and organized under the hood.  A nice feature is that, by default, it doesn’t require a SQL  database to run, instead storing all posts, comments and settings in local XML files.  Of course SQL database integration is available, and is also easy to get up and running.  Aesthetically it comes with a nice collection of themes, which are quite easy to modify, and creating your own themes is a straightforward process.”

COMMUNICATING WITH YOUR SERVER

Even if you are using Dreamweaver to manage your site connection, a more direct approach can be less time-consuming.

Core FTP Liteis a completely free and very easy way of communicating with your server files, allowing you to upload and download between your hard drive and your database. This is essential in setting up Wordpress on your server and uploading photographs to galleries.

Notepad is adequate for many changes to files intended for Internet upload. Its main advantage is that it produces simple ASCII text devoid of embedded HTML attributes.

If you are looking for a more powerful text editor with the option of editing files and uploading them directly by FTP,  UltraEdit is a good solution. Currently priced at $49.95, UltraEdit is Versatile and easy to use and ideal for text, hex, XML, HTML, PHP, Java, Javascript, Perl editing.