ready to cut the apron strings...
ok, musees, your precious muser needs a little help here, and i know y'all will come through for me...
i've been thinkin' about getting hosted, getting my own domain name, moving off of typepad (it's so sluggish!). now that i've been at this for 6 months, i figure i'll probably stick with it. i don't really know where to start, so that's where y'all come in and help me with those little questions.
who's good for hosting? do they take care of the domain stuff, or do i have to go somewhere else for that?
then what software should i go with? i didn't get in on the free wordpress thing, and i know people are happy with wordpress. typepad is MT-based, so should i go with MT? i know i've heard a lot of people unhappy with the pricing structure, etc., but i'm thinking it would be easier to move over from typepad to MT, since the stylesheets would be similar. or would they? i dunno... or are they all the same? i dunno that either. don't make fun of me, i hadn't even heard of blogs until December, so i'd say i've picked it up ok.
k, so please help, don't make this a 0-comments post, por favor!
i'll wait and thank y'all after you help. :-)
p.s. how big a pain is it to do this?
Sarah,
Great site. I would go with MT. As far as I know it is free as long as you use it for non-commercial purposes (at least it was when I got it). I host with Earthlink. Actually, I am a re-seller for them, and could get you their basic service for about $14 a month - my cost. If you host with me, I can also set up the site for you. What hosting will really cost depends on your bandwidth needs (how popular you are, how many people visit your site). The $14 gets you 10 GB transfer and 200 MB space to put your site on. You can also buy your domain name for $8.95 a year if you go to http://www.godaddy.com, even cheaper if you buy in bigger time blocks. They beat the pants of everyone else as far as cost. Good luck and let me know if I can help.
Posted by: javaslinger | Thursday, June 17, 2004 at 04:40 PM
I'm interested in the answers you may receive as I have some of the same questions.
Posted by: Donna | Thursday, June 17, 2004 at 05:15 PM
Ditto. I'm ready to start my own site as well. Fame. Fortune. ahh. the good life. Seriously. I haven't found any Bloggers for dummies out there. Share what you learn, oh wise and resourceful IMAO t-shirt babe.
Posted by: rightwingduck | Thursday, June 17, 2004 at 05:45 PM
Hi there.
I just did a lot of research about this. I ended up buying my domain name through godaddy.com for $8.95/year. I have my hosting through bloghosts.com for $3/month (they have a $30/year special now) for the basic account. They're intended to host blogs, and the customer service is great and quite helpful. I emailed them a few times before I chose a hosting company and they responded very quickly.
Good luck to you!
Posted by: Hilary | Thursday, June 17, 2004 at 07:50 PM
Well I use Blog City. While joel.blog-city.com isn't a very personal URL, it works for me. And for 20 dollars a year you get 9788 kb of file space. Lots of personalization and little extras like message boards, chats, and such. I get lots of traffic as well. I've had my site since the last week of May and I already have 439 hits.
Posted by: Joel | Thursday, June 17, 2004 at 11:24 PM
Pixy Misa at www.ambientirony.com hosts mu.nu which is free, mt and he'll even import your old posts if you like. Check it out.
This is the best thing since sliced bread.
Posted by: SpaceMonkey | Friday, June 18, 2004 at 09:09 AM
If you want to go with the crowd, do MT on HostingMatters.com. Costs a bit, but they're reliable and all the best blogs are hosted by them.
I would never have been able to make the move without Rachel Lucas's help, though.
Posted by: Frank J. | Friday, June 18, 2004 at 10:29 AM
I'm a P1, so my opinion means more, right?
Anyway, I've been using www.webfever.net for about 3 years without a problem. It's kind of small, so the service is great when I do need it. I've also set up a friend with Hosting Matters and can't find any complaints about them, but I think they cost a little more than Webfever. Good luck.
Posted by: Mike | Friday, June 18, 2004 at 01:54 PM
Yea, I'm partial to MT as well. From what I hear, alot of companies don't like to host MT because it bogs the servers down. So MAKE SURE they host MT before you purchase a plan. You can take a look at netfirms.com.
If you need help, let me know.
Posted by: Chad Coleman | Friday, June 18, 2004 at 02:09 PM
Just a few things to consider...
1. How many hits do you get per day? Do you know? If you got a lot (like several thousand) then a cheapo hosting service may not be very much fun. They will charge you extra for bandwidth you use. Most cheapo hosting services only allow you a fixed amount of bandwidth per month.
2. What kind of content do you want to serve? Obviously a blog is mostly text, but what if you decide to post lots of pictures? Pictures eat up bandwidth like mad.
3. How much content do you want to store? 200 megabytes will get you started. How long do you want to keep your archives? Forever? 200 MB may last a long time if you only do a few posts a month. Look on your computer and see how much space the entire page takes, if it's over 100 MB of space you may consider getting more than 200 MB of disk space to start with.
4. I don't know much about the blogging software, but you can pretty much assume that a lot of the content is stored in some type of database. You may want to make sure you don't need any kind of database software (you may not, I don't know) to store things like archives, or comments.
The point is that you may not get exactly what you want for $14.95 per month.
HTH, email with questions.
Posted by: dan | Friday, June 18, 2004 at 07:04 PM
I just started blogging last month and, like Hilary above, I'm using bloghosts.com and WordPress. It was very cheap to set up (maybe $20 plus the website to do everything, plus I paid for more storage & bandwidth). They were very responsive; got things done much sooner than the timeframes they quote. If you check out my site, don't use its appearance as any sort of example to their quality. I know nothing, really nothing, about coding and changing the defaults, so all I've done is post using their default. Its very easy. You're doing such a good job here, I'm sure you'll be able to make magic with them.
Posted by: Gary B | Saturday, June 19, 2004 at 12:12 AM
thanks for all the help, everyone, and please keep it coming. i'm really looking into it all and plan to make my move as soon as i get my house unpacked. if i try moving before then, i think bikermommy might never speak to me again. :)
here's a question... with hosting matters, they'll handle the domain stuff for $20/yr... do you have to go through them for it, or could i do something like godaddy for the domain registry and then use hosting matters for the hosting?
also, has anyone used movable type AND wordpress? preference between the 2? pros/cons?
thanks again for the help, y'all, and i'm still listening...
Posted by: sarahk | Saturday, June 19, 2004 at 12:20 AM
You need to talk to Lisa at http://justagirlintheworld.com/
She can help you with every aspect of it (she uses WP, which I'm using and I HIGHLY recommend). Her hosting site is here:
http://www.blogs-about.com/
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