Hi,

I am at the point where I need to get a website on line for a project I am working on. A couple of questions arise:

Which hosting service provides good value? Price, reliability and accessible help? I have been looking at Orchard Hosting but are there any other competitive solutions you would recommend?

How do I know what level of traffic to anticipate? Seems to be a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" to me but the entry level packages at most places seem to start at 20 Gb per month. I can't really get my head around what that means in terms of volume or hits??

The site will probably finish up around the 2-3 Mb mark so I have no problem with server space. I am creating the site myself so I don't need any creation tools.

Any advice please for a computer numpt?

Thanks in advance,

Mike

I use orchard hosting with no problems, and they have been very helpful what I had any problems..

Also, I use WYSIWYG to make the site as it's cheap and so easy to use.

Regarding usage, just 'suck it and see' and adjust as you go along.

PS. I'm a numpty too!!

Thanks Derek,

What sort of level of traffic do you see for your site?

I use Vidahost... started off as a "private" website and now have a re-seller account to manage all the websites I have.

They are really good, always respond to service requests... not have much problem with them atall...

What sort of level of traffic do I see?

No idea!! I am a complete computer numpty, and most of this 'computer speak' is gobbledegook to me.

But all the figures are in a Control Panel you get, but if it's working I see no need to worry about what traffic I have.

But, when I did have too much traffic, and nobody could get onto the site, I contacted orchard and they increased 'something' for me FOC, so I can have no complains with them.

I remember the word 'bandwidth' being mentioned a couple of times!!!!

you wont do 20GB of bandwidth in a month unless you have something very popular or very cheap or both.

you estimate the site to be 2-3MB, this seem awefully low so I would say lets pretend 50MB

1024 (MB in a GB) * 20 (GB of bandwidth) = 20,480MB of data transfer

if everyone of your visitors looks at everything you can have 409.6 (20,480/50) visitors per month

I will try to find out how big my site is as a comparison.

Might take me 2-3 days!!!!!!

Ah Mike, Thanks for that.

Very reassuring and I can follow it. You can't possibly work in IT. You are too easy to understand

In any case if my site does get huge amounts of traffic and I have to upgrade to a dearer package I'll be happy.

Am I allowed to hi-jack my own thread

Here goes anyway....

I want to put my site up under one .co.uk domain name but I would like to register the same under .com and a couple of other similar names under .com and .co.uk

I want these other domain names to send people (for now) to the same site. How can I do that and will it just cost me the domain name registrations or am I going to have to pay hosting for each domain name?

Sorry about the incredibly stupid sounding questions. I sometimes even struggle to work the remote control on the TV

You have U2U, Mike.

Why not just use .eu?

use domain forwarding

register your main domain mydomain.com (can be anything .co.uk or .eu etc..)

then point your other domains to that

to get a better presence on the web use framed forwarding and you can use different meta tags and descriptions for each domain.

why not use .eu, because people prefer sellers in their own country, it doesnt matter that you might have mydomain.co.uk and mydomain.de i would take both before using .eu

Mike


edit to add that domain forwarding is free, so you only need 1 lot of hosting. make sure you add all the domains to google analytics though, so you can see where you customers are landing.

[Edited on 2/3/11 by MikeFellows]

Mike thank you again. Noted and will follow your advice.

Derek, as Mike says customers expect to see a .co.uk if they are a UK customer. I'd just be interested in .co.uk and .com for now but would be looking for .fr, .be etc as time goes on. Clearly too expensive to do right now but providing my domain name is unusual enough should be possible. Also, owning the .com version of a domain name should tend to dissuade anyone from using it as .anywhere else.... I hope.

Cheers,

Mike

If you want all the European dot whatever's buy them now and just keep them.

quote:

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Originally posted by designer
If you want all the European dot whatever's buy them now and just keep them.

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