How to setup my own website?

[Linda]

Can anyone give me recommendations on getting a webite set up?
Consider me a beginner with no time to do it myself.
What does a typical site cost to setup and maintain?
Any help you cam provide will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Linda

[Rik]

Hey now, I can't have any competition now...

A lot of that depends on what you want the site to do/look like, how much space it will take up, and how bandwidth it will require. Some online services like Earthlink or maybe even AOL allow you to create user web pages (I have an Earthlink account that I set up a very simple website on years ago, and it's just been there ever since...) :

http://home.earthlink.net/~jmorg/

As you can see from the date at the bottom, I haven't touched it in almost 6 years... Earthlink provides this space for free (well, it's part of my monthly online account), but it only has 10 megs of storage (unless that's increased by now...) (I can probably pay for more). Another online provider is Everyone's Internet, that's where the Museum site was hosted for a long time (the old users2.ev1.net address), they gave me 200 MB for free (with the $19.95 montly dial-up account I had with them, which I maintain just to keep the forwarding page at users2...) You might have even heard of Ev1 since I believe they are based in Dallas... (somewhere in TX at least).

You usually can't forward your own domain to them (like ww.linda.com or something), but at least it's a real web address you can share with people.

There's other free web-hosting services that will force banner ads (and sometimes pop-up ads) on your site in exchange for free-ness (Handheld Museum was like this in the beginning)

If you got money to spend, a domain name registration is about $40/year (cheaper if you buy more years at once usually), that just gives you the .com name. I use www.powweb.com for web hosting, and I think it's about $100/year for 1GB of storage, and some amount of bandwidth that I never reach. They also provide a lot of pre-configured websites you can upload and then easily modify with your own text/pictures. For someone with limited time/web programming knowledge, it would probably be best to find a hosting service that offers stuff like that (I think even the 'free' Earthlink webspace has a couple of web templates, so this kind of thing shouldn't be hard to find...). If you want to do stuff like this Forum or things that require an active database (like a Blog or something), you are probably going to have use a pay service... Most of the cheap/free hosting services don't offer the more advanced web stuff.)

That's been the history of my experience with this website... Other's might be able to offer more info... (I'm pretty sure there's at least one or two people that web-design for fun & profit... )

Rik

[Linda]

Thanks Rik. This should help me get started.
By the way, I could never compete with "The Man" Wouldn't even try.

Linda

[mario101]

How much do you spend on your website Rik.
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Emulators are for the non collectors

[Rik]

Right now I think it's under $300 a year... Maybe about $250? I'd have to look to get an exact number... That's including hosting, domain names, and little things like the Counter on the main page.

[Roback]

Yahoo charges me $19.99 a month for Megocentral, pretty much a ton of space that I havent even gotten anywhere close to using up. They have a very effective web builder course that makes it easy for first timers. If you would like any more info please dont hesitate to ask. I'd be more than willing to help you out.

[mario101]

Well I now use Blogspot/Blogger for mine. It gets the job done for free...
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Emulators are for the non collectors