This is entirely dependent on what you want to accomplish with a website. So - what do you want to accomplish?
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hanciong wrote:
I want to create a website to host my images.
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?
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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)
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.
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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...
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