[Jim]

Where's a good place to buy some web space from, preferably with my own domain name. Primarily just for hosting images etc.. and possibly a small website and a pop3 mail account. What sort of ££££ are we talking?

Ta

[unclesomebody]

I bought mine from these guys; http://www.dreamhost.com/

I have to say they are excellent. I've only had to contact them a couple of times and a person has always responded quickly. It helps that I paid some ridiculous sum of money. I've just had a look at what they actually charge and it's $120 a year, but I paid about $15 and it included domain registration so I got some killer deal. It includes a LOT of storage (500GB) and lots of traffic (5TB) so it suits me well, but I guess you'll discount it due to cost.

OR

"$120? That's nothing".

[Jim]

cheers word but I need nowhere near that sort of space

$120 a year is quiet a lot these days to me, £2.50 a month for 16down/1up broadband is nothing

[Bubba]

ukbouldering has been with Rosehosting for about the last five years. Their support is fast, professional and they offer good value for money.

[Houdini]

$120 is a lot.

I pay €40, I think, and use about half of 1% of the space I have.

.com's are pricier, than .co.uk's or .se's, .de's etc.. aren't they?

How about www.thirteen-stone.co.uk ?

[dave smith]

Have a look at www.siteground.com I've been using them for a year and a bit now and they're really good. They answer every technical issue within 15 minutes, 24/7  Pretty cheap too, if you get a few years worth!

[dobbin]

dammit Jim you pest. Why couldnt you have started this thread a week ago? I went with UK-Cheapest.co.uk and it was £20 for a year, inc two years of .uk name reg.

[Jim]

nice one chaps.

Dimbo here need some explinations first tho.

Right I buy some webspace, I can use this as a ftp space, correct? is this the best way to use it?
Then I have to register a domain name ie what the website is called, how do I find out what is already taken or what is available?
How can I keep hold of the domain reg?
Would I be able to use it for an email account or is that complicated?
How will I know how much traffic I will use?

Ta

[dobbin]

@Explanations :

Right I buy some webspace, I can use this as a ftp space, correct? is this the best way to use it?
   yes. this is how you would add things to it. Its often the only way for you to get your files to the space.

Then I have to register a domain name ie what the website is called, how do I find out what is already taken or what is available?
  You do then have to register a name. You go to a registrar and you type in whatever you would like. If its taken it wont let you have it, if it isnt, it will. I.e. MasterBaker.com may already have gone, but MasterBaker.me.uk may not have done. You can register the latter.

How can I keep hold of the domain reg?
  once you register the name then you agree with your registrar for how long your registration will be effective - i.e. i just paid £5.50 for two years of .me.uk registration. Once the time is up they should remind you that you ought to renew. I still get renewal notices for ukb for instance.

Would I be able to use it for an email account or is that complicated?
   thats absolutely fine. You can either set a catch all forward *@masterbaker.me.uk to your gmail, or you could have individual mailboxes.

How will I know how much traffic I will use?
   Difficult to predict. Depends on what content you will serve. If you have just text based pages with a few images, and you are only going to tell your mates about it, then I would have thought one of the lowest options would suit. However, if you will host video and you will publicise it widely then you need something more in the Keith region. What are you going to do and to whom?

[slackline]

Excellent explanation there Dobbin.

I'd add a few things...

With regards to FTP, you will invariably have to ftp your files to the server (although something like PuTTy's scp is more secure since ftp and telnet both transmit passwords unencrypted, whereas scp uses Secure Socket Layers (i.e. 128-bit encryption).  Anyway, once you've got content there you may want to share it with others, there are various ways, but one is to set up accounts for other users to ftp files from your sever directly.  This is useful when you've large file(s) that you want to share with friends but don't want it available to the wider netizens (i.e. not on your web-pages as you shouldn't be sharing it).

If your not too arsed about keeing on top of your domain name then you may want to consider something like http://www.no-ip.com/ which will allow you to choose a domain name for your IP address from a select set.  I use this for my home computer, the crux of this though is that my IP address changes occasionally as IP's are dished out dynamically by my ISP, so every so often I have to change the IP address that the domain name links to (also after a fixed number of days I have to renew the lease).  You won't have to worry with the former, but will have to do the later every 60-90 days or so.


With mail, you could also setup your on mail server, but unless you really want to do this its probably more hassle than its worth, as you'd be well advised to include anti-virus mail scanners and various other things to avoid spam/being flooded with junk.

With regards to traffic you can keep your web-site off of search engines by savvy use of robots.txt (of course you may not want to keep it off of search engines, but by doing so you will minimise the amount of random traffic you get, although not all web-crawlers will respect robots.txt).

Once up and running if your interested in monitoring things you could install something like Webalizer to analyse where your traffic is coming from (and possibly adjust robots.txt appropiately).

Let us know if you need *NIX help Jim (a large proportion of web-hosting is done on *NIX servers).

[account_inactive]

To peek at who is checking you out Jim you can use a free stat counter.  I use http://gostats.com/

Useful to see if the Bangkok lady boys have been checking out your hams

[neil h]

I use hostway.co.uk really cheap, 24/7 support, they are uk based, and I have used them for 4 years now and only every had 2 down times when they had server issues. but apart from that they are really good, www.hostway.co.uk

[Bubba]

Anyway, once you've got content there you may want to share it with others, there are various ways, but one is to set up accounts for other users to ftp files from your sever directly.  This is useful when you've large file(s) that you want to share with friends but don't want it available to the wider netizens (i.e. not on your web-pages as you shouldn't be sharing it).

I would be *very* careful with this. I once set up an FTP area on my server and let only a handful of people know about the files within it. However, either somebody guessed the password or one of the handful of people told a mate who told a mate etc, but the upshot of it was I was suddenly landed with a £700 odd bandwidth bill. Luckily I wriggled out of paying it but it was a little scary.

I would sooner use a third party upload site or p2p for anything that may be of interest to people outside of your friends network.

[slackline]

Anyway, once you've got content there you may want to share it with others, there are various ways, but one is to set up accounts for other users to ftp files from your sever directly.  This is useful when you've large file(s) that you want to share with friends but don't want it available to the wider netizens (i.e. not on your web-pages as you shouldn't be sharing it).

I would be *very* careful with this. I once set up an FTP area on my server and let only a handful of people know about the files within it. However, either somebody guessed the password or one of the handful of people told a mate who told a mate etc, but the upshot of it was I was suddenly landed with a £700 odd bandwidth bill. Luckily I wriggled out of paying it but it was a little scary.

I would sooner use a third party upload site or p2p for anything that may be of interest to people outside of your friends network.

Sounds like someone sniffed your passwords.

It'll be 'cause of the caveat in the preceeding sentence re: FTP/telnet sending passwords across the network unencrypted and why I suggested using scp instead which uses SSL to encrypt this vital information (although personally I'd go for rsync as its saves a shit load of hassle and bandwidth as it only moves the bits of files that have changed).

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

A few recommendations...

Domain name wise, we use http://www.123-reg.co.uk/ who are one of the big players. Pretty cheap but a decent site and easy to manage.

123-reg is part of GX networks (until recently Pipex),  and although I recommend their domain reg site, can't do the same for their hosting called Webfusion/Myserverworld. Not helpful or good value.

Stats wise, we use Google Analytics, free and easy to use and HUGE amount of info. Proper big brother stuff, I put this on a project blog I did recently and I could tell exactly who had been on which pages, for how long for, what computer, browser and OS version  they were using etc etc.  A bit of code needs to be put on your pages, all instructions on the site. http://www.google.com/analytics/

[Johnny Brown]

Yeah, I use 123-reg an all. Not that I know anything about webspace.