Website Hosting Discussion

[CJmango]

There are many ways to host a website depending on the traffic requirements and I'm curious as to what teams use for web hosting. Much like the game, I'm sure you have all come up with a variety of clever solutions.

I'm also interested in getting discussion going and offer assistance to help rookie teams. As a website judge this year for Chicago and Wisconsin regionals, I've seen a lot of great websites, but there are a lot of teams that don't have them. I'd like to offer help to any rookies considering building a website in the off-season and I know there are plenty of others on this forum who would love to help out, too.

The other motivator I have is that a good friend of mine has recently founded his own hosting service. I've been with him for my lab website at IIT for several months and he does an amazing job. Since going online in May of 2008, they have had a 99.89% uptime with 0 minutes downtime since October of last year. So if you already have a website and are interested in professional hosting, feel free to shoot me a PM, I'd be more than happy to talk about it and refer you.

That aside, I think we can do a lot to help the rookies out there actually get into low-cost web development to build their team image and spread the word of FIRST. Maybe some of you even have web development tutorials or references to good websites that discuss web development and personal hosting? There's a lot you can do to build a website before you spend any money on a domain name or hosting.