Personal offer: Do you have a website-based project you've been wanting to do but worried about cost and design?
I'm a web designer and web host. I've basically been doing this for almost 30 years - I registered my first domain back in 1996, and I've had my own dedicated server(s) since 2002.
I've gone back to starting up a business to do design and hosting, and so I'd like to get my business out there a bit, so that is a motivation for this; but also, I have long supported hosting projects that I believed in. The longest project I've hosted has been the Simutrans community - since 2002, I have hosted most of the resources used by the community, including being the primary source for most downloads of the game for a number of years.
One thing that makes me different from most webhosts? I believe in quality, speedy, secure hosting. You can get budget hosting on overloaded servers with support that doesn't care about you. That's not what I do. For my paid customers, I charge a bit more, but that's because I make sure that the sites run as quickly as possible.
I primarily host WordPress-based sites, and I use Divi on most of those because while it's pretty easy for non-techie people to understand how to make minor changes for those that want/need to do that, it's powerful and allows me to design websites for businesses.
I'm writing this post to offer hosting and help for up to six projects that people want to work on.
What I will provide:
- Website running WordPress+Divi
- Help using Divi
- Some design help, possibly a complete design, but at least some help with design ideas
- If your project doesn't use WordPress+Divi, I'd still consider hosting you. The server is a shared server environment, meaning PHP apps - a LAMP environment, essentially
What I will not provide:
- A domain name. But they are cheap through https://Namecheap.com/. And you wouldn't need one initially as I can set you up with a development subdomain on na1.site. (And if you were happy with a subdomain, I'd certainly allow that to be permanent)
For how long? Indefinitely. I'd say permanently, but you can't predict the future. That said, as long as I'm around and you still want the hosting service. Again, I've hosted the Simutrans project for more than twenty years. So I've been around and will be.
Questions? Lemme know. Interested? Lemme know.
I'm trying to keep this relatively short, so please, if you do have questions, please do ask.
Are you hosting in your… domicile? I used to be a network engineer so I love hearing about people’s set ups. Are you doing redundant business lines from separate ISPs? Routers? Switches? Servers? Gimme them geeky deets!
Hah, nope, noway nohow. In my humble experience (living vicariously through my dad, who did run a server from his home for a number of years), the hassle is very un-worth it. At least for me.
While there are advantages, there's too much I don't want to do. And especially these days, email deliverability is hard enough as it is. Although I suppose at this point, for anything that requires email deliverability, I recommend Gmail or Microsoft 365 or some other third party email service anyway, so I suppose that's no longer a huge reason I wouldn't.
But I don't have the infrastructure available to me - I'm in an apartment. So while I can get asychronous service at 1000/100Mbit, it's a residential service, so it'd be risky to try and run servers on that. heh.
Frankly, I use barebones servers in datacenters. The datacenter I've been using the last few years is relatively inexpensive, but solid quality - a step up from datacenters that are more well known but less reliable and harder to get in contact with if something goes wrong.
So I get to pay for the bits I don't want to fool with, and not pay for the bits I can do myself - server management. :)
Do you have any particular hosts you can recommend, or hosts to avoid? And do you use VPS servers, or actual dedicated servers?
The best answer by far to that question is https://webhostingtalk.com/
Now, I haven't been out there in a good while, as I haven't needed to. As of a few years ago and before, a lot of the time a lot of the hosting companies would hang out there and you could actually talk to them. It takes a bit of common sense to parse through the offers and get a feel for which companies might be more stable than others, but for companies tha don't post directly, there are often reviews of experiences by people. So all in all, it's a pretty good resource - certainly much better than only googling up companies and looking at their websites. heh.
I will say that for a long time I was with iWeb in Canada, based in Montreal. They are now https://Leaseweb.com/ and as far as I can tell by brief searching, still good quality. They aren't the cheapest, but they are worth the money. I had to move away because I couldn't afford the quality at that time.
The datacenter I'm with now is still responsive and the servers are pretty darned good, but I did have troubles with one for a while that caused it to randomly crash, so that is a risk I take, but as I build up customers, all I have to do in such a case is move the sites to another server. So while I'm in this starting-up mode, basically losing money on things, it's hard. But once I get going, it'll be no problem. And I may well be able to go back to iWeb - sorry, Leaseweb heh - at that point, too.
I don't mind saying who I'm using, but anyone who wants to know - poke me in PM please. I trust everyone here, but I'd still like to keep a slight amoung of security-by-obscurity because you never know. I'm much more willing to be open about my margins and financials. heh.
Hi daychilde, I had been considering coming out of lurking for your adhd thread! And then you posted this!
I have a (very) small business where one half provides paid consulting and training to churches and religious groups on preventing, identifying, and addressing domestic violence in their communities and the other half provides free lay-counseling to people having difficulty reconciling their faith beliefs with the domestic violence experiences they've had. (For example, some people are unwilling to leave their abusive partners for religious reasons, and I walk them through what safety and security could look like while also honoring their faith.) I am not a therapist or a member of the clergy- I'm actually a lawyer who works for a pro bono firm. But I wanted something to combine my faith beliefs with the training and work I do for domestic violence survivors, so I took some seminary classes towards that end.
I have an existing website and my own domain, but I've been wanting to update my website for awhile. I get if you may want to prioritize someone who is more active on Tildes, but I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring anyway. Nothing ventured, nothing gained! Thank you for the kind offer, regardless!
If you'd like to know more about what I do before making a decision, please ask!
While I am not religious (ex-religious, in fact), this sounds like a good project to me, and I'm interested in hosting and helping you. My offer is quite open to business or personal sites; and as a fan of non-profits that do good work, this sounds like an idea I can get behind (rather than being neutral on the topic), so I'd be happy to host you.
I'm about to head off to dialysis - Every Tue/Thu/Sat I'm out from 5:15a-noon (or sometimes earlier), so I'll PM you when I get back. What I'd like to do is set up a dev site on the server so you can log in and see Divi in action and get to mess around with it and make sure it makes sense. It's a powerful visual page builder. There's an absolute ton of premade starter sites that you can work from, so while there's always a learning curve with any tool, it is imho not too bad. And I'll be here to help. :)
I set up sev sites on subdomains of na1.site, so unless you'd prefer otherwise, I'll use js.na1.site for you — the name is not important as it's pretty trivial to move stuff around — but if you'd prefer a different subdomain name, do let me know.
Just wanted to follow up and note that I sent you a PM a few days ago — wanted to make sure you'd seen it. No worries if so, there's no timeline. I just wanted to make sure that I didn't drop the ball on anything. :)