Suggested small business website hosting
 

Do any of you maintain a small business website or personal website, and do you have any recommendations to some good ones at a decent price? Of course registered domain and page builder is required. Not looking to get super technically involved, just something I can build and get up in relative ease, and that will remain reliably up. So many reviews seem a bit biased and not quite right. Not sure who to trust. Thanks fellas.

use godaddy to register.
use something like gator host for hosting.
use something like wordpress to publish easily.

As a web developer and designer, I ended up with squarespace for my personal website. It is something like $8/month and their templates are very nice. Between paying work and family, the time invested in a custom built personal website wasn't needed. It took me 2-3hrs to fully setup the site and that included photographing my work to post.

I believe all their packages now include shopping cart functionality as well.

We used Bluehost at my previous employer. It was fine. Almost all of them have issues. Flexihostings was terrible.

That's something to think about. I was considering doing it all with one company, but I guess it could be better to split it up a bit, both in cost and performance. Thanks.

Are you hosting with them too? Or just publishing?

We're on Bluehost now and leaving soon. Two major down times in the last 6 months.

Ewww. Good to know. Still not QUITE to this step yet. Still trying to get the cluster fuck of forms finished. Government can never just be simple. Can't get a local business license without a county, license, can't get the county license without a state license. Can't get a state license without federal tax codes and numbers. Still don't know for sure whether I need a state license, or just a local and county, and not completely sure whether the state needs me to give them a DBA. Way too many steps for what for me is going to be a very simple side income (or primary for now, since I'm unemployed). Almost need to get an attorney and a tax guy just to start a simple, one man business.

That sucks. We had switched to Bluehost because Flexihostings had been down for multiple days for two Decembers in a row, which kind of hurts a retail business.

Hosting as well. It is included in that price.

How would you rate your overall experience so far? I'm not super concerned with a feature packed website, as I think most of my business will be word of mouth, and business card driven. A website would be nice to just showcase examples of my work, and to be a central location with all of my contact information.

To be fair to them, it wasn't exclusively their fault. EIG's data center in Utah is where all of their stuff is hosted, and that data center had two long downtimes this year. It affected a few other companies as well.

I got caught up in the angry mob of redditors that switched from GD to NameCheap, at least for domain registrations.

That said, I've been very happy with them. No stupid behavior like GD w/ the spam, or recurring sales calls. Looks like namecheap does hosting too.

I would avoid GoDaddy like the plauge.

1. Legalzoom to setup the LLC (they have pretty much a Q&A methodology).
2. Godaddy to register the domain(s) (did the .com & .us)

Advice... make your domain simple to type and if it doesn't match the business name make it a natural association.

3. We use WIX to host (easy to setup, use, maintain).
4. Google apps for business for email (xxxxxx@domain.com)

Good luck with the business. After 4 years it's the primary income source for both of us co-owners.

Thanks. If it works out like I hope, I will be able to support myself with the income. I'm sharing a business model with a family member who started a similar business in Charlotte, and she is only a year in and has had to hire 4 people to help her out. So it's going well for her. I also have a broader range of skills than her, so I will be able to branch out a bit more and offer more services on the side, compared to her. I shall see how it goes. The start up investment is very minimal, so if it fails, it fails. But I have a good feeling about it working for me.

I have done very little with it since I set it up. Setup was easy, easily customizable, and looks good. The primary focus was be a personal portfolio. They offer a free trial so you can dig through their templates and mess around. As a person who is starting to freelance web and print design, companies like this are going to kill me.

Www.mmeador.com

Thanks for the link Tekel.

I was looking for a service like this.

Cheers!

Finally starting to get some traction on this business stuff. Got the sales tax and local tax paperwork back and have the payment methods and all of that jazz set up. All I lack is the local business license, and finishing up the website. Already have business logo designed and waiting for business cards to be made. I just need to go talk to a tax professional and figure out exactly what all I need to do. I still feel a bit overwhelmed with all of this tax stuff. I've never filed more than a 1040 in my life, so dealing with multiple tax accounts for a small business is a bit over my head. When do I do what, on which forms, with which agency, ect. There may be more things that I am ignorant of, but I will find those things along the way. Thanks again for all of the help guys.

I work in the IT industry. DON'T use godaddy/hostgator/bluehost/other generic host here. Their services might provide decent up-time, but their support is really bad and they don't care about you. It might be a little cheaper, but in the end it isn't worth it when you need help with some little issue and they blow you off for support and you are waiting ~24 hours between replies. This is one of the reasons I like to support the little guys.

It's like buying something from TSE/949, you may pay a tiny bit more from our vendors, but you get their support and expertise behind the product, and they care about you. I've been using http://www.handsonwebhosting.com for years now, and the support is top notch, hourly backups are included, and they actually seem to care about helping you when SHTF (database corruption, haxorz, you messed something up and need the files restored, etc).

My experience with the big companies (godaddy, etc.) in this industry is that their servers are packed to the brim, their email all goes through a single shared IP which results in blacklisting, and their support is almost non existent.

I'm the IT guy for our small business amongst my other hats as an owner. For sure, there's more to it than I'm going to portray especially for bigger business's and ones who host their own services like email and such. But honestly, it's not hard to figure out and not like blowing an engine if you fuck up the tune..... You just won't get email or have a Web site until you figure it out.

There's no reason you need to use the same company for everything.

Domain = godaddy for cheapness
Email = Google for robustness and spam elimination
Web site = pick one of hundreds of there for ease of use and applicable templates .

Like using this site.... Google is your friend and read, learn then ask.

Part of owning a small business is either doing it yourself or farming out the parts you either can't do yourself, on your "spare time", or you just plain "don't want to do it yourself".

Good luck!

On a related note. Anyone ever had to deal with an affidavit for their business? I may have to delve into that realm of things as well. Some of my least favorite things, tax law, economics and other legal mumbo jumbo. Comes with the territory of a business I suppose. Get used to it.

Thread Revival!

My wife has a photography small business. Like infant photography. Like bring your 9 day old baby to have ridiculous outfits put on and pictures taken.

She's at a point now where she needs a website.

So, what say you mt.net? Who should she use for a photography website? Smugmug and Zenpholio obviously cater to this market but the prices are....NG.

She needs to be able to host large amounts of photos (uhhhh...duh?) and make personal galleries for her clients. Built in cart shopping would be a plus.

Pretend like both of us are completely clueless in all things website design/hosting/publishing etc. Pretend like you are trying all of this to a nine year old...from 1998.

Thanks in advance for any advice. If you are really bored you can search for "Erin Wilwert Photography" on the Facebook to see what she's done so far...

Smugmug seems to be built around the photographer and the workflow of photography and the templates seem to offer a sense of "professionalism" that I would expect from someone I was to buy either a product or service from.

The higher end plan, while maybe expensive at first glance, also gives you a way to "upsell" the client and therefore providing more revenue easier (if that makes any sense).

You'd need to buy a domain, which you can do through GoDaddy or a number of others then assign it to your Smugmug account.

If it were me, and I was serious about making money from the venture, I'd invest the money as infrastructure and expense it out (she is going to form an LLC or something similar right?). Buy the annual plan and be done with it.

Just my 2 cents.

Good luck!

I know GoDaddy is ranked pretty high but I dumped them for Namecheap.

Interesting, I see they offer FreeDNS. Might need to find out if they can do that on a "port by port" basis I.E. only port xxx.xxx.xxx:1194 as an example.