First post here – hoping to get some good advice. Here goes……
I need to set up a website for myself, for several purposes. Firstly to advertise my services as an experienced English Language teacher, secondly as an academic proofreader, thirdly to advertise my design projects (mostly epoxy resin so far), which I hope eventually to be able to turn into my main profession/activity, and finally just to have a blog for writing about whatever is on my mind at any given time.
I do have a reasonable amount of experience with web design, albeit a long time ago, and I’ll definitely need to brush up a bit. I had a web management job for a couple of years around 2010, which involved mainly using ModX (I wonder whether that even still exists!!!) I’m also not afraid of Linux servers, so I think I’ll be happy enough starting from scratch with a server and a CMS, even if it takes a bit longer. I was thinking first about taking the lazy option of using a company like Squarespace or Wix, but I’m now inclined against that by the thought that they’re probably pretty inflexible about expanding the space once you’re locked in. That plus the fact that for sure they’re presumably much more expensive and (I assume) it’s really difficult to migrate your site elsewhere once you’ve set it up with them. Please correct me if my assumptions are incorrect, but I think I’m better off trusting myself to be able to do it myself, and to have the flexibility.
OK, so here’s what I envisage at first. I’m OK with just the one domain (no need to multiply costs), but I guess I’d be wanting to have subdomains (teaching.abcxyz.com, proofreading.abcxyz.com, blog.abcxyz.com and design.abcxyz.com to start with, and maybe more later if I think of them). Possibly I would want each subdomain to be on a different CMS, just to keep things nice and clean, and to make it easier to differentiate them (but I don’t know if this would make sense – let me know please!!!) So I need a provider that is OK for that, and also flexible on space. I don’t expect to use a lot of space to start with, but maybe I’ll want to add demo videos later. So I need to have the option of scaling up the space. Also of course I need the right CMS. Not sure that Wordspace is up to all of what I’ve described, but again please correct me if that’s unfair. Needless to say that e-commerce is also going to be necessary at some point, but should I assume that all comes as standard these days?
Well, thanks for reading if you’ve got this far. I guess I would just appreciate pointers to the right CMS and a few suggestions about where to get webspace (I’m in the UK, by the way, if that is at all relevant to the decision).
CMS #1. If you do not want to be a web developer, I suggest WordPress. Good enough and tons of sources for helping you out.
CMS #2 There is a more environment friendly CMS - Hugo - that claims to be the fastest CMS available. Smaller footprint and faster than WordPress. Using less resources and you can use smaller VPS.
Hosting #1. You could give IONOS or UpCloud a try. You get a VPS for 1 GBP to 7 EUR a month that should be enough for hosting one single site with some sub domains. And use Cloudflare as a proxy to speed it up. Cloudflare also has a cheap domains for sale. Managing subdomains is very easy at Cloudflare. VPS + Cloudflare is harder to set up but gives you more freedom.
Hosting #2. A regular hosting with mail account etc. Way simpler, but more limited. Others may have good suggestions for this path as I have left this train several years ago.
Haha, MODx does seem to still be around. There are so many CMSs out there. A lot that used to require payment now have a free tier, like ExpressionEngine and Craft, so they are worth checking out.
I think most web hosts would cater for what you described. Whether you really need a CMS or not is up to you, but in a way they have similar lock-in issues as hosted solutions like Squarespace, although in a different way.
In what way? I’m guessing that you mean that they lure you in with a completely free package, but then start to charge you once you need something very specific to plug into it. Well, of course it’s been a long time since I was in this game, so forgive any naive questions.
Hi, and thanks very much for replying in so much detail. There’s lots to take in here, so I’ll come back with more questions when I’ve had a look at all this!
Sorry, I probably used the wrong wording. I just mean that each CMS works differently, and your code and content are often broken into many pieces that aren’t easy to transfer to another system. So if you start with WordPress, you essentially have to rebuild your whole site if you want to transfer it to another CMS (or maybe try your luck with some script that allegedly does that for you).
Don’t be afraid to ask naive questions. Those are the only ones I can answer.
I would recommend Infinityfree for hosting. They support PHP and MySQL and give you 5 gigabytes of storage on their servers, and (the best part) is that you get all that for free! You can purchase a domain, configure domain extensions (example I purchased example.com I can configure test.example.com for free).
If you don’t want to pay for a domain, they’ve still got you covered: they have purchased certain domains, which you can get extensions of for free. For example, I can get all these domains for free:
Ha, don’t worry, I prefer to believe in most people’s essential truthfulness, otherwise it’s all just toooooooo depressing! I’ll have a look at them. Hopefully I’ll get a few more comments yet, so I can take stock of all that in a day or two
Hey, I’ve just been having a look at this, and took one of the lovestoblog.com domains, which I’ll play around with for a bit to see what I think. Well, it seems quite nice, but I’m just wondering what’s in it for these guys!
You have taken a subdomain on the top-level domain lovestoblog.com from InfinityFree.
I have had a similar subdomain from InfinityFree since November 2019. It is still active and, as far as I am aware, it will not expire.
Your subdomain is probably very poor for SEO.
Also I have had some indication that visitors to a website on a free subdomain may get a security warning from their antivirus software.
The free subdomains and free website hosting are great for messing about, especially as PHP and MySQL are supported. As you wish to advertise your services in due course you will need your own top-level domain for search engines.
I’ve been using Infinityfree for over a year with no renewing (or any) problems. In terms of “what’s in it for them”, they put ads on their site and control panel.
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