Website Woe

[Dave Ihnat]

Someone else recommended setting up a blog; that would be the least
complicated and shortest time to completion.

If you must run your own website, I do not recommend you host it yourself.
It doesn't sound like you're comfortable with the setup and maintenance
issues and security involved, and the upload bandwidth adequate to support
any site that becomes popular isn't going to be cheap.

You can have a domain, mail, and web hosting running in a day or two by
doing the following:

  1.  Go to Network Solutions and find a domain that's not already registered
      that sings to your soul.  Buy it for three years; cost from NSI: $75.
      (You can find cheaper Domain Registrars, but the cost difference is
      marginal--maybe $40--and NSI, no matter what you may feel about them,
      *is* the 800-lb gorilla and has good support, especially for the
      person new to all this.)

  2.  Go to SpeakEasy.  Buy their Standard Web Hosting package at
      $9.95/mo.  This will give you a lot--DNS hosting, domain 5 domain
      E-Mail accounts + 10 aliases, 500Mb web storage + 10Gb/mo. transfer,
      support for your own PHP & CGI/Perl scripts, etc.  It does *not*
      include MySQL, so either don't pick a blog package that requires
      that, or move up to the Premium package at $24.95/mo.  BUT, you
      can always upgrade.  This will be set up within 15-20 minutes of
      your call to them (have a credit card).  Have them create your
      domain E-Mail account(s) at this time.

      You can, of course, pick any other host you wish (although I would
      strongly discourage GoDaddy for anything).  I recommend SpeakEasy
      because, despite the trepidation I feel about their acquisition
      by BestBuy, they've provided excellent technical support and
      uptime, and *say* they're committed to business-as-usual despite
      the acquisition.

  3.  Go back to your Network Solutions account login and change the
      DNS servers to point to NS1.SPEAKEASY.NET and NS2.SPEAKEASY.NET.

  4.  Use their Site Studio tool to create a placekeeper website to get
      your initial message out.  It's a simplistic, but lets you create
      a site within 5-10 minutes without any coding skills.  Also go
      configure your E-Mail account(s).

Total cost to get started: $85 plus $9.95/month.  Total time, maybe
an hour.

After this, you need to either write your own web page, or find someone
to do it.  You can pick any of the Open Source blog packages, etc.

That's as cookbook as I can make it.
--
	Dave Ihnat
	President, DMINET Consulting, Inc.
	dihnat at dminet.com