Web site hosting options

We can place your site on either, rented web space from reputable hosting companies (recommended), your own ISP's server if you have one, or on one of the free ISP servers that are available. There will be charges involved in the former option, and may be charges involved in the latter two options. We recommend you use the first option, and pay for the web space, for the following reasons.

  • There are some very good deals around.
  • Domain name registration is normally included in the price.
  • You have access to a CGI bin. This allows all sorts of scripts to be used for form feedback/interaction with your visitors.
  • You gain access to your 'web logs'. This is INVALUABLE information which tells you, how many visitors you've had, what they looked at, what they didn't look at, where they came from, which search engines, browsers, keywords they used and lots of other information which you can then use to tweak your site.
  • Using your own domain looks more professional, www.yourispname.co.uk/~yourname - doesn't!
  • It's worth the low cost for the reliability of the servers, i.e. you can be assured that your site will be 'up' all the time, and be fixed immediately anything goes wrong.
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As a reference cost, we hired this (50MB) web space, and registered our domain name from a web services company for less than £150 (UK Sterling), so we not talking very expensive costs here.

As a site size reference, our site is about 14 MegaBytes in size (with all the free graphics), and has around one hundred and forty HTML pages to look at. A typical HTML page generally runs to between 2 and 40 kilobytes. Additional server space (if required) is usually rented out in blocks of 10MB.

You should budget between £100 and £200 per year for hosting facilities for a small to medium sized web site. Advanced features, for example databases on NT servers, shopping carts with SSL etc, will cost more.

You're going to set up hosting yourself, here are the questions you should ask the hosting companies, with explanations of why you should ask. This should help you to get the right package for your site.

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- : Site Map : -

What will you need?

What the site will need, depends very much, on what you want it to do! Brochure sites typically need just HTML/XHTML, Javascripting, graphics and maybe a CGI bin for form feedback. This is basic stuff, that uses standard hosting packages.

More Interaction?

What's interaction? Playing a game on-line, searching a database, running competitions, running polls, hosting chat rooms, selling products.. etc.

These type of sites take much longer to develop, require significantly more advanced skills to complete, and needs additional hosting requirements, ultimately leading to significantly higher costs!

Updating the site

If the client wants to update it, then content management software may be needed, so costs for this will need to be included. If an outside party updates the site/database, then you will need to budget for this too.

Promoting the site

Don't forget to allow sufficient costs for promotion. It's useless if nobody sees it! We offer this as an option on all sites we build, and as a separate service to clients with existing sites that need a boost! Contact us if you need this for your site.