You need a website, part 2 – choosing a host

Yes, we talked about this before. We covered some things in detail, in particular how to choose a host that will grow with you. I related the issue of how a free webhost can hold you back and prevent you from doing lots of the things you might want to do, even if they do permit adult.

Once again here I’m going to put in a plug for the freedom you get when you can host images on your own site and manage them as you please.

Even if all you want is to make a blog right now, putting it on your own website is a smart move. You can still drop blogs around here and there, so long as you’re staying within the tos of the free blog hosts. But for the blog that represents you, you’re putting a lot of work in on it. It should be yours, to do with as you wish.

If you’re going to put that much work in on it, you should have the option of making it a real site.

So here’s the story I’d like to relate to you. I spent much of this weekend installing a new website for a girlfriend who previously had a bunch of very strange pages created by a customer who knew nothing about web design or adult web design for PSO. Those pages were not only ugly in a 1992 sort of way, but they didn’t work right. You’d have to click a button several times to get a “mouseover” to work so the photo would show, instead of a large blank space. It was kind of a maze to get to her existing blogs, which were stuck with the default wordpress theme.

So I replaced the entry page with a really pretty one, the main page with one that links directly to her new blogs. Drop dead gorgeous if I do say so myself. And the blogs are very pretty, too.

Unfortunately, due to her choice of server, there were several problems that needed to be worked out. We never were able to change one of her settings, which would be necessary to get maximum indexing for her blogs.

But the big deal is that she selected this host because it looked like it would be good for a beginner. They had some kind of site builder, an uploader of sorts, and some other cool stuff that no longer works for her because her new computer has Vista. And the stuff she thought was going to save her time and money? While it made it harder (read: more work) for me, the biggest problem was making the blogs work right.

After a discussion on the forums:

Things could have been worse. At least she had apache/linux hosting. If she had chosen Windows hosting, as many “starter webhosts” offer, she would have had to move to another server to do what she wanted. You don’t want a Windows server. Just take my word for it.

If you have to pay somebody to install a blog for you, that’s an hour’s work, if nothing goes wrong. If there’s a problem, it can take several hours for somebody who knows what they’re doing to sort out the issue and fix it.

The problem is that when you pick a free wordpress theme, you may be getting something highly standard, or you may be getting something that seemed like a good idea at the time to the designer. Fixing a misbehaving theme can be a real pain. And none of this should be necessary, because if you choose a webhost that has simplified installation for wordpress, you click and you are ready. You are provided with a large number of themes that are ready to use. Dreamhost has “One click” installs for wordpress blogs and lots of other popular installations. On the rare occasions when I had issues, it was from upgrading very old blogs, and they went out of their way to fix them for me.

If my girlfriend had had to pay me for the time I spent straightening out her blog issues, she’d be out of money right now. The little bit of convenience back at the beginning that saved her doing research and asking for help would have ended up costing her a load of money in the end.

For those of you who are still nervous about what it means to use FTP to upload files and images to your website, I’ll be writing a little tutorial on that shortly. It has to be little. It’s a lot simpler than you could ever imagine.