On Mon, February 2, 2009 12:39, k t wrote: > Hello! I am going to be establishing several websites! > > As I research domain name registration and hosting, there seem to be > so many variables popping up. > > Windows Livemail has a deal w/private domain name regis. free for the > 1st year; but after that it goes up to $14.95. > > One thing I am wondering is whether, if I switch domain name > providers, I can somehow preserve the name. But mainly I am interested > in finding the best deal on establishing domain names/hosting. > > If I can get some input from web site owners that'd be great! Never sign up on a service where they own your domain name. So long as you own it yourself, you can have it point to various sites, and move it as you like. If you have even slightly serious intentions, go for a real web host, not something like Windows Live. I'm with Dreamhost, which has its ups and downs. I'm paying about $8/month (could be less if I prepaid for 10 years, say...yeah, right), but for that I have shell access as well as ftp access, and I can host unlimited domains and subdomains, and the email for those domains and subdomains, large numbers of MySQL databases, and I have very high disk and bandwidth limits. I think it includes registering one domain, too. And there's a good community there, and a help wiki with real info, and their email tech support is actually very good (I've never gotten a useless answer, and I mostly don't ask the easy questions). And they have several CMS (Drupal, I think, and Wordpress) on one-click install, and also the old class "gallery" photo gallery software (which I don't like) and the very nice new Zen Photo gallery software on one-click install; plus you can install anything that runs as CGI, and PHP stuff, and Ruby-on-rails stuff I think, very easily. I'm hosting <http://dd-b.net/> there, and <http://richard.dyer-bennet.net/>, and <http://dbpromo.dd-b.net/>, and more. Then again, I'm a software eingineer and sysadmin, and did 9 years where web development was my primary business; I may know too much to give useful advice to somebody relatively new to it. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
