best option for hosting three tiny websites?
 

hi - using fasthosts to host three separate domains, which all don't have much info on and will never be anything other than reference sites. They are well compressed and pretty tiny... and thus paying three times for hosting the domains seems a bit of a waste.
There were some excellent links for "free domain hosting" on here, but I'm unsure what is optimum as you don't generally get owt for nowt?

I'd like to be able to control some space but have flexibility to put up more small websites easily without an extra £50 - now rising to about £65 - per annum.

Any thoughts?

My website is hosted through 1&1, and my domain names, at very reasonable rates Jon. Have a look here and use one of the adverts at the bottom of any page to get details.

HTH

Just set up my own web server running on an old PC. Software was free and there has been no bandwidth issues. We are running on 8mb downstream (yea right BT!)
Very easy to do and you have as much space as you want.

Forgot to add: You do need to get a fixed IP address from your ISP tho'. This is not always possible.

I have 3 websites and email server running from an old IBM thinkpad 600 (£20 off ebay). I had no knowledge of what I was doing before I started and had it up an running with a single site in 2 evenings and had the 3 sites within 3 evenings!

Here is the free web server http://www.apache.org/ and here is the free email server http://www.argosoft.com/rootpages/ both free (well the email server you can buy an upgraded version if you don't want to be limited to 5mb emails).

I have a 20mb cable connection but up speed is 728kbs, which actually loads the pages faster then when they were held on a dedicated web host.

I use www.domainmonster.com (much cheaper then many other companies) to hold the domains, this then gives full dns control for pointing the domains to my home ip address, which whilst is dynamic has not changed for over 4 months, and if it does it is easy to redo the dns records to reflect the change. But many ISP's provide static IP's or they can be made static for a small fee.

The other benefot of self hosting is that you can set up sub domains etc, which not all hosts allow!
Try it your self and give it a go, I was quite chuffed when I got it all working.

so presumably this thing has to tick away, permanently on, in the corner of a room... and one just checks that its working by making sure your website is working everyday on your "other" computer which gets turned off and on?
Can it all be done on same line that one has for domestic broadband as well?

Yep, the laptop/webserver just sits with the lid closed (power functions set to stop it going to hibernate or suspend with top down) in the corner of my home office. I check it every now and then, but to be honest the best way to check is to use the email server as well and if that can't auto connect to check for new mail then you know there is something wrong!

And it is all run from a domestic BB subscription. Assuming that you do not get 000's of hits an hour then this should be fine. You can set it up on a machine you use day to day as well, it uses very little processor/memory. I had it running on my main PC for a couple of weeks before I sourced the laptop to run it on. Once yo do some googling on how to set it all up it really is quite easy.

My next task is to make the server/laptop into a digital picture frame so it has another use whilst it is on. I have a 2nd laptop that is already dismantled and running the picture display program, just need to build a nice frame for it and then move the server part across.

How much bandwidth do you require? And how much space do you require?



I have quite a lot of spare space currently hosting my domain but I'm willing to allocate a couple of sub domains for you if it's not to large and will not increase my costs.

You can normally redirect your non hosted domains to another domain for free. Check out 1 & 1's facility for forwarding the domain requests.


I use IXWebhosting and they only charge around $60 a year for 1 .COM domain and 20gb of hosting. this includes unlimited sub domains.

thanks very much for the offer... but its just a complication for you. And its nice having the business contractual obligation IF it can be used efficiently. What is interesting is what you say about sub domains... what actually are they and how do they work?

i.e. if I am paying £50 for a domain hosting, is there any reason why I cant have the other domains on that if I have "band width"?? r would they appear as lesser things?
All I know is that space wise, they are tiddly and traffic seem to have about 10mb traffic a day - probably 50-100 visits max.

Sub domains are as follows.

Main domain would be www.mydomain.com

subdomains are
www.mydomain.com/sub1
www.mydomain.com/sub2
www.mydomain.com/sub3
etc..

Most isp's that register your domain will allow you to forward teh requests to another website so you could do the following.

buy and host www.domainx.com

Register www.domainy.com and have it auto forward to www.domainx.com/domainy

That way you pay for 1 hosting account aand have as many domains using the webspace as you want. The alternative is to register all your domains with your hosting company and pay to have them all serviced by the same hosting account. The same principle applies. 1 hosting account and multiple domains.

I have a number of domains all routing to the same hosting account but each domain links to a different sub domain on my hosted account. That way it's easy to manage when I upload stuff using FTP as each sub domain is a seperate directory.


I dn't mind setting something up to show you with a real world example.

thats all interesting.... but if i need xyz.com and abc.com to look like those to all viewers, I'm stumped then?

(I've used forwarders before, but if it still means that you have a "cheap looking" domain name in the address bar, it aint gonna work...)