by Christie Ewen
Web hosts
I spent about a little over a week researching webhosts. There are lots of cheap webhosts. Basically, you get what you pay for. What you want is scalability, reliability, and support. In the end, I chose hostgator. I am very happy with this decision. They have live chat so I can ask pretty much anything with one click. For example, “What’s the difference between domain.com and www.domain.com?” They’ll answer anything.
Here is a breakdown of webhosts that were recommended I looked into:
| Web Hosts | Cost per month Starts at | PROs | CONs | Other |
| | $4.95 | Great reviews 5/5 stars review Great live support Very good uptimes | $9.94 off package price: COUPONCODE994 | |
| | $3.95 | Highly recommended by a friend web programmer | 4/5 stars review | |
| $3.67 (limited time offer) | limited features compared with other webhosts | | ||
| $0 for 6 months, then $6.99 | Recommended by users | | ||
| $2.99 | “One stop shop for domains, web host and everything in between” | | ||
| Free trial for 30 days $9.95 | Supports the Joomla! open source community Great way to start using a CMS right away | Limited live support Only supports Joomla! | | |
| $3.45 for a limited time | | Based outside US | |
For more comprehensive reviews, just google “lunarpages review” and “hostgator review” and so on …
Some of the reviews are outdated so what was true a year ago might not be true today.
Content Management Systems
CMS can help you quickly build a website.
I decided to go with Drupal because we needed technical flexibility. There is a huge community support behind Drupal so you can build almost any kind of website with Drupal. There are modules for almost everything like search, facebook, twitter integration, and so on.
I like Joomla! because I was able to get it up and running very quickly on cloudaccess.net which offers a free demo site for 30 days. Learning it didn’t take very long with the videos available on cloudaccess.net. The problem I found is that the user interface was not intuitive. I recommend trying it to get a feel for what CMS can do. Another nice thing about cloudaccess.net is their support for the open source movement without which we would be reinventing the wheel a million fold.
For some projects, Word Press might be all you need.
Outsourcing
You can save a lot of time and money by hiring programmers from India, Indonesia, etc. Just be sure when you outsource, you don’t outsource your “secret sauce”. Your “secret sauce” is what sets you apart from any other website. You can review outsourcing companies on sites like elance.com.
I’ve personally never hired anyone from www.xicom.biz but they got very good reviews on elance.com so they might be worth checking out.
Copyright. Christie Ewen. October 28, 2010 All Rights Reserved.
