Well, I know the fact the the season isn’t over yet but we are already looking towards moving off of blogger from our original website and moving into our own custom templated website but it comes into this question.
Who or What can we use to host our website? I’m really stuck on this question and I was wondering what you guys did in order to keep your site up, is it just ran on your own server or do you have a host?
To host a website yourself, you need a webserver to host the site on (Windows server: 2003, IIS6; 2008, IIS7.5; Linux, Apache), a static public ip address (or a Dynamic DNS, such as dyndns.org), the ability to open port 80 on your router/firewall, and your ISP has to allow website hosting. You also need a broadband internet connection with a descent amout of upload speed.
You also need to have a domain name
You can purchase hosting from companies such as enom.com, 1and1.com, bluehost.com, etc… I host all my websites at my own hosting company.
I program most my sites in ASP.NET, but have done some PHP.
If you need help send me a message.
Running your own server is pretty unnecessary for a simple team website. For one site of mine, I use Bluehost. They seem to have been pretty good overall and they support pretty much anything you will need. Load speeds could be a bit better but this could be mitigated with a free CDN like Cloudflare. I would recommend looking around and comparing your options. Personal opinion though, I would NOT recommend using GoDaddy for anything.
Team 781 uses Dreamhost. If you purchase a domain name and hosting from them using this link, we’ll get a 10% discount. Once you’ve done this, you can ftp your existing Blogger files onto your server space at Dreamhost. Your website will stay up. Then you can modify the files to create your own custom template.
If you’re a 501©(3), you can get free hosting from Dreamhost.
Weebly is a simple and powerful (and free!–but you’ll get some good extra features with a Pro account) WYSIWYG editor. You can build a custom template and even write custom code within the editor. I seriously considered making our website with Weebly (but that was before I realized my team already had a server).
Our website is fully hand-coded. It was fun, but seriously, if you can use a good CMS, do. Hand-coding is a PAIN if you do anything somewhat near the previous Website Award winner’s level.