From: Digest To: "OS/2GenAu Digest" Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2010 00:00:05 EST-10EDT,10,1,0,7200,4,1,0,7200,3600 Subject: [os2genau_digest] No. 2017 Reply-To: X-List-Unsubscribe: www.os2site.com/list/ ************************************************** Thursday 02 December 2010 Number 2017 ************************************************** Subjects for today 1 Hosting : Dennis Nolan 2 Re: Hosting : Peter Moylan **= Email 1 ==========================** Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2010 19:42:32 +1100 From: Dennis Nolan Subject: Hosting Firstly A very Merry Merry Christmas to everyone. Now the reason for this post> An organisation I am a member of (The Australian Photographic Society) has just received a hosting proposal from Net Registry Pty. Ltd. and asked for my comments. Does anyone have any comment on this company? Regards Dennis. -------------------------------------------------- http://www./melbpc/ - The Melbourne OS/2 SIG === **= Email 2 ==========================** Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:47:34 +1100 From: Peter Moylan Subject: Re: Hosting Dennis Nolan wrote: > Firstly A very Merry Merry Christmas to everyone. > > Now the reason for this post> > > An organisation I am a member of (The Australian Photographic Society) > has just received a hosting proposal from Net Registry Pty. Ltd. and > asked for my comments. > > Does anyone have any comment on this company? I don't know anything about it, but it looks respectable. My feeling, though, is that anyone who is sending you hosting proposals is likely to be more expensive than anyone you find by searching yourself. There are lots of hosting companies around, and the prices are all over the map. I'm currently going through the same exercise for my choir. After checking a number of hosting companies, I am inclined to go for WebCity, who has been my domain name registrar for several years and has shown every sign of being respectable but inexpensive. (I chose them originally because they had better prices for domain name registration than other Australian registrars. And I avoided non-Australian registrars because there are some very shonky companies out there. (Side comment: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES DEAL WITH THE DOMAIN REGISTRY OF AMERICA.) The WebCity prices for hosting are listed here: http://hosting.webcity dot com dot au/compare.php Note that prices go from $6/month for very basic hosting up to $50/month for all the bells and whistles. The (more typical) prices from NetRegistry are shown here http://www dot netregistry dot com dot au/web-hosting/ and these range from $16/month to $300/month. This is a good indication of how much price variation there is in the market at the moment. There are other companies with even higher prices. To work out total price, you need to look at these components: - the actual hosting, as covered above; medium to high cost, depending on things like how much storage you need. - domain name registration (usually cheap - I'm paying about $12/year for my domain) - DNS hosting: cheap, and often included in web hosting plans, although I'm finding it a bit of a headache figuring out exactly what is and isn't included. - web site design: zero cost if you do it yourself, but can be pretty expensive if you use professional designers. - e-commerce facilities if needed (e.g. accepting credit card payments on-line): this can cost more than the hosting itself, e.g. the NetRegistry cheapest package adds an extra $60/month to the basic cost. (But PayPal provides a cut-price solution for this.) You need to think carefully about what features you want from the hosting provider. For my choir the cheapest possible solution should be OK - we don't do e-commerce, we don't expect large traffic levels, we can live with web pages that aren't too fancy, we don't need more than one e-mail address, and we only want a basic presence on the web: 3 or 4 pages plus perhaps a photo gallery. A 1 Gigabyte disk space should be adequate for us, so I'm going to recommend to our committee that we go for the WebCity cheapest deal. I imagine that a photographic society would want to chew up a lot more disk space for graphics, so it would want a hosting plan that has generous disk space provision. (People in such a society will certainly have a better feel than I do for how many photos you can fit per gigabyte. Photos are going to be the dominant factor in deciding how much disk space you need. The HTML text is insignificant by comparison.) Maybe it would also want to use a professional web site designer, but note that you can decouple this decision from the hosting decision. Some companies offer a "package deal" which is web site design plus hosting, but in my opinion that limits your options. Either design your own site, or search for a designer who is independent of the hosting company. I presume that the society would only be doing a limited form of e-commerce: things like annual renewal of membership, but not things like selling stuff. If so, search around for the most basic sort of e-commerce support. (It's not essential to use the solution provided by the hosting provider.) If the society does want to sell stuff on-line, tread very carefully. I don't have experience in this area, but I know that the prices can be frighteningly high. That's why people like shareware authors stick to PayPal. It might be basic, but it's cheap. I have a 5-page OpenOffice document that I prepared for my choir to explain what is needed and the likely costs. I don't think this list accepts attachments, but I'd be happy to e-mail it to anyone who asks. (But note that this is for an economical solution, as befits a small community group, not a professional-quality one.) In the next couple of days I have to refine that document into the form of a concrete proposal. Peter -- Peter Moylan peter at pmoylan dot org http://www.pmoylan dot org -------------------------------------------------- http://www./melbpc/ - The Melbourne OS/2 SIG ===