Hello all,

I need help from you guys/gals who own websites. I want to create a website to host my images. Here is my complete gallery in deviantart: http://hanciong.deviantart.com/gallery/. (Do you have any suggestions/advices for my images? Anything is appreciated )

About the website itself, I want to ask a few questions:

1. What webhosting do you use and which plan?
2. Eventually, I want to put advertisements in my website, and earn some money from them. I hope to cover at least the webhosting costs. Do you use advertisements in your website? If yes, does the earning cover the webhosting cost?
3. May I know how much traffic to your site? How many visits per month?
4. Did you build your site from scratch (using html, css, etc); or you did you use a website builder (like wix or weebly)? If you use a website builder, could you share your experience with me? (what builder did you use, is it good or not, etc)

Thank you very much for your help Have a nice day!

This would be a useful topic for me as well to be honest but here's what I do know of.

My dad used to rent a server and used a personal computer with Linux on it as the box, I don't know how that works but I know it gives you full control over it including webhosting and the like, we also used to use simple-machines software for a forum, we didn't make the theme from scratch but we did work on it a lot (my dad more than me, although I did fix up graphic design).

I have made offline websites and I used HTML and a microscopic amount of CSS.

I used Notpad++ to construct my websites, here's a review I did on notepad ++ and here are 2 html pages. - This is 2 HTML pages designed to give you a kick start with a couple codes, this isn't a template and there is no CSS. - It's soul purpose is to show you what codes do. - Enjoy!

Hi hanciong,

You actually have many options at your disposal. Considering that you don't have all that many images, you can easily get by with a basic shared hosting account, which would cost less than $10 US per month. If your site grows to 1000s of images and lots of traffic, you would need to move to an entry level VPS, which will cost you around $30 per month.

I won't recommend a specific hosting company, but you can visit the forum listed below to find a good image host.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

Most good hosting companies will offer 1 click installs of the most popular free open source image gallery software packages. There is really no need to reinvent the wheel and write your own. The following open source packages include all of the functionality you'll need, as well as providing for customization.

Here a few of the open source packages for you to consider.

Gallery
Piwigo
Coppermine
ZenPhoto
TinyWebGallery
phpAlbum

If your host provides a current version of Softaculous, you can easily install any of these (and other) packages, directly from your hosting control panel.

Your Webhost and Gallery software will track your statistics so you can determine traffic and views.

Don't bother with advertising. It will just get in the way of your users and you won't make much money anyway. It's not worth it, unless you're a really big website, with tons of traffic, like 10,000+ unique visitors per day.

This site gets around 3000 unique visitors a day or around 90,000 unique visitors a month, which equates to approximately 1.3 million page views per month (and growing). I could run a bunch of ADs and probably make $100-$200 per month or more, but I wouldn't want to do that to the members. The scripts, which power the ADs, includes tracking code, as well. There is nothing worse that visiting a website that runs 20-30+ scripts, sucking all the power from your PC and browser, just to run ADs and track your movements. I block everything, except the minimal required to view a website's content. Even then, it's a hassle to surf some websites.

Hope that helps get you going.

@ hanciong, best of luck whatever you do.

This is entirely dependent on what you want to accomplish with a website. So - what do you want to accomplish?


Did you just want a place to showcase your images? If so, is there something that the current offerings are not living up to for you? What in particular is it about what you're already using (or that might be out there) that you are unhappy with?



1. My own site (http://blog.patdavid.net) is hosted on Google's blogger platform. The reason is that I occasionally get big spikes in traffic, and don't need 100% control over the backend. I'd rather spend my time writing/creating than managing a server or hosted install of some software (wordpress for instance). With blogger I've got as much control as I really need (and more) over pretty much the entire site, so I don't feel that I'm missing much personally.

2. I do use ads on my site, but ask yourself if you're providing anything of value to your hopeful readers that makes having ads worth it. For instance, if I write a 5,000 word tutorial, I'll put two ads in the post (one up front, one dead last - that's the limit from google, and for good reason). Don't make them obtrusive, make sure they are relevant as much as you can. If I am just posting a photo or something relatively short I won't even bother to put an ad in the post.

Honestly, worry first about producing something worth visiting your site for. Worry second about being a good citizen on the internet and building a relationship if possible with your audience. Worry third about doing the best job you can with what you're producing. Somewhere around 50th place is where I'd put worrying about using ads. Ask yourself - how many sites that you visit regularly do you support by clicking ads as often as you can to help them out? I have a list I try to get through every time a site I like posts something. Like an article? Click an ad to help. Don't like a post, but happen to be at a site you visit a bunch anyway? Click an ad. It's the least expensive way to help content creators that you love.

2a. If I was hosting my own servers I would probably just make enough to keep the lights on hosting all my own content (my posts tend to be image-heavy and include large downloads, like my .xcf files). It's a good month if I manage $15.

3. I'm around 50k pageviews a month at the moment, give or take 8k.

4. As I said, I'm hosted on blogger, but I'm intimately familiar with html/css/js - so I started with a dead-simple theme and then beat it up a bunch to my liking.

Figure out what you want to do first. Then find out what services won't let you before you worry about hosting...

Hi,

I currently use jAlbum for arranging my photos and host them on their site. I don't have any real HTML knowledge so am happy to use jAlbum. While I haven't done much investigation their rates seem reasonable. Some of the skins used with the jAlbum software have integrated shopping carts eg. Turtle. I only use the site for family photos and the like so don't do any selling etc.

http://jalbum.net/en/

Hope it helps

Cheers
Bob

I am hosting my images on an old Pentium stuffed in a closet in my basement. I am paying about $10 per year to register my domain name at NearlyFreeSpeech.net and have a cron job that checks my IP address every 60 seconds and updates the DNS records if they've changed (a static IP would've cost me a whole lot more and I would still need to register my domain).

I am running an instance of MediaGoblin to handle the image uploads, which I've modified to handle uploading of GIMP resource files such as XCFs, brushes, gradients, tool presets, etc. More information about my modifications are available on my weblog (also hosted on the same server).

Unfortunately, my upload bandwidth is less than 1Mbps so my setup won't handle very much traffic; and it is susceptible to power outages and hardware failures. But its cost of less than a dollar per month fits my budget and I am enjoying the learning experience.

I just wanted to mention that many ISPs do not allow this and will kick you off if they catch you. Here's what's in my ISP's TOS.

The customer may not establish a web page using a server located at Customer's home. Customer will not use, or allow others to use, Customer's home computer as a web server, FTP server, file server or game server or to run any other server applications or to provide network or host services.


The big problem with PPC ADs, especially from Google, is they allow the advertisers to embed spyware/adware/malware into the downloads the user is directed to from the ADs. Do you think it's wise to help promote and facilitate this kind of thing?