Domain Hosting

Now that you have a domain name, you have to decide who you want to host your domain.  Some companies can be flakey or unpredictable, some provide better service than others.  Here are our choices and why.

Lunarpages

For a large web site that has had an internet presence for 10 years, it has grown in size through the years until it is now nearly 600 pages in size and still growing.  For this web host, our first choice is Lunarpages.  Lunarpages is a branch of add2net which has been a long standing industry server for big internet companies who require large bandwidth with a wide range of services and millions of hits per month.  Lunarpages was a spinoff to house the smaller individuals and small businesses who cannot afford the big dollar services.

Secondly, Lunarpages customer service is nearly unbeatable.  It has been more than once I've typed in a question about my service and had a response within 20 minutes, and many times I've called them and had a service tech on the phone within 5 minutes.  I can tell you from experience, there are a lot of hosts out there that rarely return an email within 24 hours, and sometimes phone waits are hours in length.  I'm not saying this is true for all, but if you decide to wing it on your own choices, be aware that not all servers out there are consumer friendly.  We currently own 18 domains, and lunar pages is our host of choice for the 3 top domains we have, and a few smaller domains hosted under one account as sub domains here.

Lunarpages also has all the latest features and software including easy to set up forums and and galleries.

For the Gourd Reserve web site and 15 subdomains we are using 1.5 Gb of space, (out of 350Gb available), and today as I write this, it is the 21st of the month and we have used 2.0 Gb of bandwidth.  Our typical bandwidth usage for a month is about 3.5 Gb.  One thing you should take note of is, The Gourd Reserve is 600 pages in length, we host a forum, lots of pictures of our own art work, and we also host the Gourd Artists Showcase which has several other artists work posted on our site.  This is a lot of pictures and pictures take up a lot of space.  Before adding the forum and increase our images to include so many pictures, we were only using about 250 Mb of slace, or about 1/4 of a Gigabyte.  (Not to mention our 15 other su domains)

Mom Webs

Moms Webs is another great hosting company.  We use this web hosting company also, but they are beneficial for another reason.  We have several domains hosted on this one package for $10 per month. PLEASE PAY CAREFUL ATTENTION TO THIS DETAIL--- You may not understand what i am saying here, but this is crucial information.  Many and in fact MOST web hosting companies claim to offer, 6 domains, 10 domains, etc under one account.  But, this is not exactly accurate in technical terms.  What they do is set you up as a sub domain, then put it into a frame so no matter what page your visitors are on, al they will see is your domain name, like in the example debspansies.com, if they are on a page like debspansies.com/roses.html, all your visitor will see is debspansies.com.  In other words what they are doing to give you this domain is making a sub domain under your primary domain, then masking it in a frame to look like your domain name.

Here is the problem with this, many affiliate links and many advertising links will not track correctly through frames, and you might not get all your commissions.  With Moms Webs, each domain is a true domain.  It will follow you through the web site, so you can go to Godaddy and buy all the domains you want and host them under one account.  We have about 10 domains hosted under one account, which really works out to about 1 dollar per month per domain, plus Godaddys annual renewal fee of $8.99.  How much can we make?  there is no limit.

The only down side to Mom Webs is you get much less in domain space and band width, so you need to keep an eye on it, but if your getting traffic and doing your web site correctly, you should be making money and want to increase your space and bandwidth.

As a last word, the difference between a domain and a sub domain is, www.thegourdreserve.com is a domain.  It has the www followed by the domain name, and an example of a sub domain is http://www.affiliateresourcesrus.thegourdreserve.com/ yes, that is the web site you are on right now.  Notice the sub domain has the www followed by the sub domain name, a dot, then the primary domain name.  This is not as nice and clean as having a direct domain, but it works just the same.

now all you need to do is figure out how to build that web site