Websites

[XSK_Diamond]

I just wanted to give the smaller and/or new organizations a heads up on how they can avoid not being taken seriously based only on their website being hosted on GeoCities, Angelfire, or some other free hosting service that puts ads on the web pages. Also, a paid web hosting account will allow organizations to send/receive email from their own email accounts. Ex: officer@yourorg.com. There is plenty of low cost web hosting available. You don't have to resign yourselves to free hosting Hades.

Here is a list of five web hosts that I have used at one time or another over the last few years (I'm a blogger). All were reliable. All have hosting options (on Linux servers) for $5 or less per month. One is free, but does not put ads on your website; instead you see them in your admin area when you login to do website maintenance.

I hope this can help somebody.

Zymic Webmaster Resources - Have free hosting. Some restrictions. Ad-supported, but ads are not on your web pages. They also have "premium" hosting with a mind-boggling amount of disk space and bandwidth for $4.95 per month.

Turtle Hosting - Have 100Mb web hosting accounts for $0.99 per month (Basic plan). Yes, you saw that correctly... 99 cents per month. For this price you get more than enough space for a small/new organization. Other than less disk space and bandwidth, clients get the same account features as the higher priced plans. Their hosting plans top out at $4.99 per month; but honestly, for $5 they don't offer as much disk space and bandwidth as some of the others on this list do for the same price.

Lytenhost - Their "Very Light" hosting plan gives 200Mb of hosting space for $2.13 per month.

Hostgator - Their "Hatchling" hosting plan gives 350Gb of space for $4.95 per month.

Simply Hosting - Their "Plan A" gives 750Mb of space for $4.95 per month.


These hosts are good places to start. Don't forget to register your domain name so you can use it with your web hosting account. If the web host you choose also registers domain names for less than $10, you can go through them and have everything in one place. But, be aware that if a host offers a free domain, you have to keep your account for 12 months (or pay them the domain registration fee), before the domain is turned over to you. If the host you choose does not register domains for under $10, GoDaddy has the best consistent rates and sometimes run specials, and you can usually find a working 10% discount/promo code on the Internet (I've heard their web hosting is affordable, but not good). Yahoo Domains costs $10 for the first year, but at renewal jumps up to a ridiculous $35 a year. Do not fall for this.

For the record, I do not work for any of these hosts and I am not getting paid to promote them. I just figured that some new and/or small GLOs have websites on free hosts because they don't know there are affordable alternatives. I have the info, so I'm just passing it along. There are many more low cost hosts out there, but I only listed hosts I've personally used at some point, and these recommendations are based on my personal experience with them at that time.

Again, I hope this helps someone.

[XSK_Diamond]

Hostgator made a major change to their shared hosting accounts. The accounts now have unlimited storage space and bandwidth. Prices did NOT change.