Starting a website? Hints?

[UT03]

I want to start a website. It is purely for pleasure, not out to make money. It will be a meeting place for my friends and for me to learn what it takes to start one.

How much should it take to register my domain, and get it hosted? Anyone have any good recommedations as far as where to do this?

Basically I want it to be a message board and with just news on my friends and such. Any suggestions will help. Thanks

 

[zzzz]

You can register a domain name for as little as $9 at GoDaddy:The Link

A site that doesn't get much traffic shouldn't cost you more than $5 to $10 a month for virtual hosting. Some of the cheap hosts oversell though which can affect performance.

It's a really competitive business and many people are simply resellers that do not have much technical expertise. Support is what sets hosts apart. Do a search to see what people are saying before committing to any particular webhost.

Invision Power Board is a good free messageboard.The Link Another popular one is PHP BBThe Link .

Your host may offer a control panel which makes setting up a messageboard as easy as clicking a button.

Otherwise, you may need an FTP program like SmartFTP to transfer files to your web space (server):The Link

 

[UT03]

very good stuff, appreciate your help.

 

[zzzz]

One more thing, a pet peeve of most webhosts are the hosts that offer "unlimited" bandwidth or disk space. In reality, such a thing doesn't exist. If you have a resource intensive site, they'll drop you citing the terms of the agreement. Also, hosts that extend such offers may attract resource-intensive sites that may affect your server's performance — as a virtual hosting client your website will share space with (likely hundreds of) others on a server.

 

[TexasOwnzYou]

$3 registration for .us domains and $6 for rest.
The Link

+ they have great deals on hosting.

 

[hornface]

If you have cable or DSL, you can host it yourself, and use no-ip. you'll have a virtual domain, and a little app. to make sure your IP-address right. I did this, and it took a few hours (more or less depending on you saaviness) to set up. It can pretty much all be done for free, and if you don't anticipate alot of traffic it won't tax your connection too much.

Message boards are a pain in the *** to set up, especially if you don't have telnet acess to the server, and even then, if your not familiar with unix, well thats too bad. When you choose a hosting service, make sure it comes with a database (usually mySQL) or a message board is out of the question. Make sure it comes with php, or JSP or some other scripting language.
good luck.

 

[M00kiE]

The Link

host my website thru these guys. great prices and they're local. Keep Austin Weird and all that

 

[TornACL]

Dude, be careful before you get signed up with a webhost. Check some message boards specifically dealing with the subject for customer reviews.

I signed up for imhosted.com because it was cheap and flaunted a 99.97% up-time rate. BULLCRAP. It has been a huge pain in the ***. I need to sack up and move my site to a new host.

After all of the problems, I finally went and looked up the user comments for the company, and they got terrible reviews.

 

[TexasOwnzYou]

actually, message boards arent that hard to setup.

i setup phpbb in less than 2 minutes without going command line anywhere.

you run the index.php for the first time and it asks for the database details (which can be directly copied from your host) and it then let you setup the admin passes etc...

it was a lot easier than i had expected.

 

[idigTexas]

lunarpages.com is tough to beat for value. You get a lot more storage and bandwidth than most other hosts for about the same cost.