Finding a hosting service web tutorial:
Finding a hosting service for your Jane Austen or Sherlock Holmes related website is both easy: there are a lot of choices; and hard: there are a lot of choices. But in some ways it’s a lot easier if you’re creating the website for an official JASNA regional chapter or Baker Street Irregular scion society — in other words, if you’re a 501(c)(3) or non-profit organization.
Let’s dispense with paying for webhosting, something I have to do for my domains. I am charged about $10 a month, which I pay up front for a year. I could pay as little as $3.95 a month were I to pay upfront for two years and were content with just hosting two domains on that one account. You see with most hosting services, the more you pay, the more you get for free, and I know that oxymoronic, but there it is.
For my $10 a month ($7.95 for a two-year contract), I get three free domain registrations and can host up to 15 domains under the one account, although often when you check out the fine print you’ll see some of those features disappear over time, like when you sign up for cable or Internet access and you’re told the price is good for the first six months. Right now, I’m running five websites under my one domain and four of those domains are registered with my web hosting services, some for free and others paid ($4 a year). So if you’re shopping around, you’ll want to pay under $5 a month if all you want to do is host your chapter or society, and you’d like a free domain name, please.
But if you’re a non-profit, you can probably avoid paying for webhosting altogether. Just search “non profit web hosting” in Google and you’ll find a lot of companies that will offer you low or no price hosting.
Google also offers free web hosting, the catch is that your URL will be something like https://sites.google.com/site/jasnatutorial/ unless you pay for a domain registration that points to your Google site. You also must use Google’s design tools and templates to design the site: no custom HTML. I’ll talk about hosting a free Google site in an upcoming tutorial.
UPDATE: I was wrong is saying Google sites offer no HTML. It’s actually very similar to creating a blog posting at blogger.com; you can switch between the visual editor and the html editor. What you don’t really much control over is the overall html/css of the web site.
Another option for free hosting is to get an academic to join your group. Admittedly higher education isn’t what it once was, but still many universities provide their staff with free hosting, especially if it has anything to do with their speciality. You’ll probably have a URL with .edu in it, but that actually gives it a lot of cachet, in my opinion.
Finally, there’s free web hosting, but obviously you get what you pay for. You might have to endure advertising appearing on your web site and you probably have limited customization options. Still free is free.
A final desperate option is to find out whether there’s anyone in your group who has some spare bandwidth lying around. I’m talking about someone, perhaps a business person, who already hosts their own website and who might have a spare domain name and hasn’t hit the limit on the number of domains their account provides. Obviously this is not a long-term solution, especially if your site takes off and so many people are visiting your society’s website that your patron exceeds his bandwidth.