I have noticed that many on this forum have their own website for their layout, some pretty nice ones too. I am wondering who hosts your web page, and how much does it cost?
WW,
My ISP (Earthlink) gave me 10MB of free web hosting space with my internet service. I was good with that until recently when my website started approaching the 10MB threshold. After going back and forth about it for a while, I decided to “upgraded” to 5 GB of space for ~$20/month. The domain name was free.
Check with your own ISP, WW, and see if they already offer you a certain bandwidth of space for web hosting.
Tom
Google Blog, it’s free, and no annoying popups or other advertising crap that can annoy your visitors.
I use railfan.net for two sites for the past 14 years. Cost? $80 per year for each site.
I have had three interruptions in service for most of a day over the years. Not bad for 14 years.
I have several free websites on Google Pages, no ads, fairly simple to use and view. See mine in my signature below.
I use www.trainweb.org
It’s a FREE web host for train related stuff. It has other interesting train stuff too.
I use WYSIWYG WebBuilder to build and maintain the site. I also use it for some other sites (The main use). It’s a great product and not expensive. But I’m sure that Bravenet and some others have free hosting and web builders if you are interested. Google “Free Web Hosting” for a bunch of stuff.
TrainWeb has some ads since it’s free but not bad and no pop ups I think. They don’t support PHP in case you care. Probably not.
TrainWeb also provides plenty of space for photos, etc.
AceFTP is a nice free FTP utility, though WebBuilder includes an intergrated FTP tha is VERY easy to use.
Have fun,
Mine is not free, I pay for it yearly, but I have enough space to handle photos, write ups, and more. Have had it for several years now, but I don’t want to publicize for them. If you look at my site and are interested in information about the host, email me.
Bob
@WWTrain:
There are several ways to accomplish having a website, each with varying degrees of difficulty, freedom, and cost.
What most model railroaders want is a place to showcase their layouts and/or provide information about it. That being all that is required, a website can be very simple.
Running with the above needs for a website, we end up with two basic types of files we need to host: HTML files and Images.
Html files are text and do not take up much storage space at all.
Pictures are binary data and can take up significant storage space.
Many ‘free’ web site hosts don’t have a lot of storage space, but there are ways around that.
The cheapest solution is to host your HTML files on a ‘free’ web site host, but keep your pictures on a different host. There are many image storage sites out there (Flickr, photobucket, etc). By uploading your pictures to, say, photobucket, and then linking to them from your HTML, you can have a simple, easy to use, and free web site.
For the more adventurous of us, some hosts offer paid plans that involve a significant amount of bells and whistles that would make having a site even easier. Using Wordpress as a site software has become a favorite among many people now.
Here’s a vote for blogger-it’s free (unless you spring for a domain name), very flexible, now includes a “pages” feature, and most important, it’s very easy to update. If you want to author an interesting web page, in my opinion fresh content is imperative. No one will visit a web site over and over to read the same content or look at the same pictures. That’s why ease of updating is so crucial-it’s something you will be doing often if you want people to return.
I have my own webspace as well, and have built a number of sites over the years. FTP isn’t a real pain, but it’s nowhere near as seamless as a new post in blogger.
I’ve been pretty content with blogger, although I have considered going with something hosted on my own space. So far there just hasn’t been a real reason to make the move.
Jim
Mine in ANgryhosting, and it’s $1/mo for a basic web site with email for 1 domain. I actually have 3 domaisn so I go for the next step up which costs me $3/mo.
Don;t let the low price foll you, this is not liek some Geocities junk full of ads, and there is a very high speed connection plus plenty of transfer allowed for anything except some huge commercial site - and there are more expensive plans which give more domains, more email addresses, and other stuff like database servers and so forth. In 6 years of hosting here I’ve never seen my site down.
–Randy
I’ll throw in another vote for Blogger. Easy to use, extremely flexible, Google’s horsepower, and it works. I can post from any computer or even my phone… http://dmirhillcitysub.blogspot.com/