Cost to run your own Website

[Vegas Poboy]

I see a lot of photographers has thier own website to post photos and advertise. I would like to know how much is it costing per a month and how many MB is the max you can store on it.
I'm trying to decide on hosting my own, hiring out, use www.fototime.com or equivalent.
All comments welcomed

[arthurb]

This question is like asking, "How much do I need to spend to take good pictures?"

Hosting plans and quality vary by large amounts.

The worst part is that the prices don't often match the quality. In other words there are some inexpensive hosting plans that are very good, and there are expensive plans that are crap.

And just like photography, "Experts" have different views of what is good and what is bad.

I own about 75 domain names and have active sites on most of them. I have been burned badly by some hosting companies, mostly as the economy soured, some companies left the business with no warning. My sites are all g rated sites.

You should be able to find hosting around $15-25 a month to handle the type of services that you will need for a photo website. This cost assumes that you are going to build the pages yourself. You may find hosting as cheap as $5 a month or even $1 a month, but you have to be very very carefull, since those companies are the ones who tend to go out of business with no warning. And if you are not a techie and need support, the cheap companies offer little support.

If you want to hire a company to build your pages, the costs vary widely. Some places charge hundreds of dollars per page, others charge hourly rates for work. Either way it isn't cheap, unless you find a student who is looking to create an online portfolio.

If you would like my personal advice please email me at eos@ajb.com and I will be glad to give you links to find a hosting company.

Good Luck

[NickC]

I don't run 75 domains but have 3 or so (one that gets 3 to 5 million hits a month) and have done extensive searches for what you hope are good web hosts. There are some "review" sites that rate web hosts but I fear they may just be shill sites for a small consortium of web hosts, you know?

You can search for "(name of host) + reviews" in Google and you will come up with some interesting results. But beware of the sites that look like shill sites (just my paranoia talking).

Right now, it seems like $20-25 a month will get you 1GB of storage and 50GB of data transfer ("bandwidth" means nothing now).

You can also email me if you like for some links or recommendations, or de-recommendations.

[PacAce]

I pay about $60.00 per year ($5.00/mo.) plus $10.00 yearly for the registration of the domain name. This gives me 1 GB of traffic per mo. and 80 mb of data space which is more than enough for my needs. I use www.hostica.com and they have different plans based on what your needs are.

[Cordell]

I use www.netfirms.com and like it a lot for my current needs. It only cost me less than $75 for a year using their step up from basic. For what I'm doing now it is great. I can upgrade as my site gets more traffic and I get my photography business going.

I registered my domain name with www.godaddy.com because it was a little cheaper to go through them and then have my site name moved over to netfirms.

As mentioned, if you are okay with designing your own site, many smaller companies with a low annual fee is great to use. Since this will be your first site I would urge you to take this route because your traffic will most likely be small (unless you have big bucks for advertising).

[GenEOS]

Check out http://www.ev1servers.net/english/index.asp

I have been using them for years now.

Webhosting is just $10 per month for 100Megs webspace and I have never been charged for excess traffic.

All you need to start is to get a domain name, and they will assist with that too.

[RGorrill]

I have been using http://www.fatcow.com for several years to host my websites and have found them to be very reliable and reasonable with pricing. This is what you get for $99 per year:

500 Megabytes of Disk Space for Your Files
25 Gigabytes of Monthly Data Transfer
100 Email Accounts
Shopping Cart
CGI, PHP
Friendly Toll Free Support
30-day Money Back Guarantee
Webstats

The space that I have is more than enough for me to have my personal website with images, my Big List of Photography, the Camera Clubs of Region 15 (formerly Camera Clubs of New England), a church website, my son's micro-brewery website, several individual camera clubs and one devoted to my role as a Region Director for the Photographic Society of America.

Bob

http://www.photo-ne.com

[kn_guy87]

Have I got a deal for you!!!

I signed up from here for 3 years FREE:
http://order.1and1.com/xml/static/Home;jsessionid=347929304E19EF784712FDC47E822D36.T C61a?__frame=_top

I registered my own domain here for $5 + tax
http://www.ev1servers.net/english/index.asp

I used this tool for my photo online album:
http://www.delx.ca/dalbum/index.php?go=Features


I'm in the process setting up my site. I will have some more free time this holidays to finish it.

Ken

[NickC]

If you think your site is going to be busy, if you go with a bargain basement deal you may end up getting dinged with massive overage charges for too much data transfer. If you think your site is going to be slow and not take up a lot of disk space and downloads (data transfer), then you can go for a lower priced plan. Otherwise, it's usually best to plan for and pay for expansion capabilities.

You can start out with a bargain plan, but monitor your data transfer accumulation every few days so you don't get charged when your site gets busy. Bandwidth overage and data transfer limit overage fees can be exceedingly painful (my wallet will attest to this). Read the web host's FAQs and overage charge policies.

Watch for hotlinking attempts -- those can suck up your limits in a hurry when web leeches find your cool photos and link them to their sites or posting boards (or, when war breaks out and a plane goes down and everyone runs to your site for F-117 photos like they did to my site once). If you go with a Linux/Unix solution as the server, you can prevent hotlinking with a .htaccess file. Windows server solutions may or may not be able to do this (not the last time I checked, someone correct me if I am wrong).

[Vegas Poboy]

Thanks for all the info, classes will be over in a couple of weeks and I'll take the time to research the websites and try to come up with a design.
Again Thanks

[rockyc2]

Vegas Poboy wrote:
I see a lot of photographers has thier own website to post photos and advertise. I would like to know how much is it costing per a month and how many MB is the max you can store on it.
I'm trying to decide on hosting my own, hiring out, use www.fototime.com or equivalent.
All comments welcomed

I use FortuneCity for my Picture Web Site. It is a great Host, that I have had for a few years. Check it out at http://www.fortunecity.com If you would like to take a look at my site, then go here http://starbrighttwo.com
Rocky