Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Everything Else => Topic started by: shmokes on September 11, 2005, 07:31:55 pm
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I'm starting to think seriously about building a website for myself. I don't have any immediate plans to use it for anything other than a personal website, and a repository for media that I can link to from message boards and/or My Space. I'm trying to decide how best to go about it. I'm thinking that likely, for my needs it would make more financial sense to go with a hosting company, rather than running my own web server. I would have to upgrade my cable internet to a business account in order to get a static IP. That's my main concern about going that route. On the other hand, I'm thinking that I could make my MAME cabinet my web server so that the computer inside it, which is overkill for a MAME machine (Athlon 2400 I think), could pull some more weight. I'm not sure what the extra cost would be with upgrading to a business account. It might not even be a consideration until February, cos I'm getting a killer price on my internet services currently cos when I switched from DSL to cable I also switched from DishNetwork to digital cable and got in on one of those "trade us your dish for a year of cheap cable with all the movie channels for free" promotions.
Anyway, the other option, of course, would be to have someone else host it. I haven't checked around at all, but my ISP's cheapest package is $15/mo. for 250 MB online storage and 16 GB bandwidth. How competitive is this? For all you people with experience, who do you think has the best prices? I'm not real thrilled with the 250 MB limit. That doesn't seem like much. I'm not going to have a website that generates much traffic, and it will be pretty basic. No ecommerce. Just some basic HTML and Flash. But I do want to use the space to host picture, music and video files for message boards and My Space. The hosting, of course, implicates the 16 GB of bandwidth too. How competitive is that number?
I definitely don't want to spend more than $15/mo (and would very much like to spend a lot less). I suspect that I would have to spend at least that to upgrade my internet service to a business class account and get a static IP, so I am currently leaning toward a 3rd party hosting service, at least until my needs expand.
Please advise.
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www.ipower.com
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Classic. Thank you.
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Or if you want to pay nothing more a month try http://www.dyndns.com/
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I've been using www.e-rice.net for a couple of years now. No problems, and cheap. 10 bucks a year.
Then go to godaddy.com and register your .com. $9.00 a year.
$20 a year for your own domain. Not bad.
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www.doteasy.com does free hosting with no ads.
Right now I'm using www.totalchoicehosting.com which lets me have php/sql/perl and unlimited email and ftp accounts for a few bucks a month.
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Been doing some research and it looks like I'll go with PowWeb (http://www.powweb.com/PowWeb/OnePlan/Detail)
I found some website that reviewed and rated web hosting companies and they gave them 9.5/10. For $7.77/mo. you get 5 GB of online storage and 300 GB/month bandwidth. 10 GB of bandwidth per day is a helluva lot of space. And that price includes just about every imaginable feature. 650 mailboxes with POP and IMAP support, PHP, MySQL, Subdomains, Email Virus Scanning and Spam filtering. I swear to god, it even includes SSL and a shopping cart if you want to set up an ecommerce site. I don't know anything about that and won't use it, but it sounds pretty impressive for 8 bucks a month.
Their domain registration is heftier than godaddy, at $15 a year, but if I pay for two years of hosting I get don't have to pay for the first two years of domain registration.
Thanks for the info. It was searching for reviews for ipower.com that led me to PowWeb.com
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I recommend Site5. ( www.site5.com )They are top notch for small shared hosting. My great experiences with them ended though when my site became too popular for the plan I was on.
All you need is the cheap of the cheap hosting, and a domain name (directNic). www.directnic.com
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Next step:
Can anyone recommend a good web software suite? I've looked into Mambo (http://www.mamboserver.com/) but the setup is fairly complex. Since it is larger than I need anyway, can anyone think of a similar, login capable server that is free?
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Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but I'm using PHPWebsite:
http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/
Setup was pretty painless. I've been pretty happy with it.
-S
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That's not bad... simpler than Mambo, still login based. Does it have a forum module?
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Yes it does, although I've never used that particular feature myself.
-S
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Neato. I'll give this one a shot and see how it goes. My football team asked me to take over the website for them, since I'm a software engineer and no longer have to focus on game conditioning for the time being ( :( ) The existing site is kind of sad and rarely gets updated more than the upcoming practice time info.
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Hey shmokes, if you want a local solution, WestHost is here in Utah (in Providence, right by me in logan, I live about 2 blocks from them and I use them for stuff like my dads website etc...).
http://www.westhost.com/
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http://www.1and1.com
Cheap and reliable. They host arcadetokens.com, santoro.com, and mamenation.com without issue. I use Netobjects Fusion (which they provide for free) to do my development.
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Yes it does, although I've never used that particular feature myself.
Haven't found a forum module yet, but I did find this one, which could be quite useful:
LeagueSite - Sports Team/League CMS
LeagueSite is a PHPWebSite module that adds roster, stats, and schedule information for a sports league or team onto the PHPWS base. It can be used to create a website for their fans to learn more about the league and its teams and players.
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Another vote for 1and1. We use 1and1 for the dedicated hosting. All of arcadecontrols is with them, as well as most of my other sites I host seperately.
I don't have experience with their shared account offerings, but I've heard more good than bad on other forums that rate providers.
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With regards to website/forum software... my vote is a Mambo/SMF solution. The main BYOAC site will eventually be going to Mambo, and it provides a bridge to SMF. Mambo is a bit of a bear to learn and setup. But once get over that initial learning curve, it works great.
Again, this is just my preference. The only way to know for sure is to try them out and see what fits you best.
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I tried Mambo. It WAS a ---smurfette--- to set up, and given that I work knee deep in J2EE, that is a statement. Circular configuration items were rampant, making it an exercise in frustration. It's also really heavy for what I need the website to do, meaning all of that annoyance wouldn't have enough payoff.
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I can appreciate that (both Mambo and J2EE, plenty of experience in both). The options it gives is both the good and evil of the product. It's integration into SMF was nice for us, so that was the main choice.
Good luck with iPowerWeb, they seem to be decent from what I heard. I do know that Retroblast was there for quite a long time.
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I'm not familiar with SMF.
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It's the forum software that we're running here.
http://www.simplemachines.org/
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Right... I dont' really need a high volume forum like this. I anticipate 20-30 users, most of them intermittent.
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It's for low or high volume. Of all the forum software I've had to use, SMF is one of the easiest and robust ones to setup. In 10 minutes you could have a fully functional SMF site. The footprint is minimal (about 5 megs of php code) and requires a database (prefereablly mysql, others will work).
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Right... I dont' really need a high volume forum like this. I anticipate 20-30 users, most of them intermittent.
The forum module in PHPWebsite should suit your needs fine. There aren't many features really, but it should be ideal for a low volume like what you describe.
-S
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The source for smf is well written too making it easy to work with. I am going to try and do some more integration of the control.dat site with the smf forum.
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I too will submit my vote for SMF (http://www.lewismedia.com/smf.php).
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PHPBB is free.
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I thought Cold Fusion was just an IDE? It has a server piece?
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PHPBB is free.
As is SMF :)
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I thought Cold Fusion was just an IDE?
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Right. I've never really played with CF, just seen sites developed with it. I spend most of my days wading around in enterprise scale J2EE app code. I personally don't, but a lot of people at this level of development look down on CF as being for amateurs or people just getting out of a ten week training program.
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Right.
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I think the problem comes from the fact that a few years ago, it WAS a tool for amateurs and people getting out of a ten week training program. I used to see them get out and get jobs as CF developers. It was pretty good at making a quick but limited ecommerce site at the time, but not much else.
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Just downloaded phpwebsite, will give it a shot this weekend.