Website builder / hosting service?

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Death
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Website builder / hosting service?

Post by Death »

I'm looking into making my own website which will be a hub for a few different things such as all of my music projects, a podcast, offering mixing & mastering services and more. I'd need to do things such as embedding music/videos from streaming services, sell music via the site, have a news section, display photos etc.

I don't know html or anything like that and I don't plan to learn it anytime soon (probably never will) so I need something that can be designed very visually with a GUI. I'm on a very tight budget so I can't spend much. I don't want to host my own website at my own IP address either so the server needs to be somewhere else. It'd also be nice if the website was being maintained & secured by the service as I don't even know how I would go about something like that. Something privacy respecting of myself and visitors would be good.

Does anyone use any services that can do this sort of thing? I know there's stuff out there but I'd like to get personal recommendations.

Thanks.
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milo
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Re: Website builder / hosting service?

Post by milo »

I've been using WordPress.com since 2014, and it can do everything you want. My music site is hosted there, and I also have another blog hosted there. There are various pricing schemes, even including free. You can easily embed audio and video from other sites like YouTube and SoundCloud, and you can even have WordPress host it with a paid account. The gui web interface is pretty easy to use. Of course if you know html and css it will help you, but you don't need to know any of that to make a good looking site.
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Re: Website builder / hosting service?

Post by Death »

Thanks for the advice. I have been looking at WordPress but some things about them and this whole process in general confuse me. I hope you can help..

1. WordPress confuses me so much when it comes to accepting payments on there.

* You can create an eCommerce site starting at $8 a month: https://wordpress.com/ecommerce/

* But another page says you need WordPress business to sell stuff and that's $25 a month: https://wordpress.com/install-plugins/

* Then there's the pricing page which says you can collect payments from $4 a month but eCommerce is $45: https://wordpress.com/pricing/

Seriously, how are you supposed to make sense of all this!? :shock: Haha..

2. Any idea if you can use custom, third party themes and plugins with the free accounts?

3. There's stuff here about hosting: https://wordpress.org/download/. I understand what website hosting is but it looks like WordPress can do that for you. So is this something you would pay for in addition to your WordPress account or is it a completely separate way of setting up a WordPress site that doesn't require a WordPress account?

4. Domains seem to be something that you rent from these types of services. Is it possible to just buy one and permanently own it, being able to use it on any service?

Cheers :)
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milo
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Re: Website builder / hosting service?

Post by milo »

First, WordPress.com is different from WordPress.org. The .org is home to the open-source server software than lets you run WordPress on your own webserver. The .com is a commercial webhosting site using the software. Basically, the .com is how they fund development of the .org.

Understanding that difference helps you makes sense of web search results about "how to do x with WordPress." Most of the results refer to the .org software, not the .com hosting.

Regarding WordPress.com, free accounts will not let you install 3rd party themes or even host the media files. You have to get a paid account to host media files, and a business account to install themes.

The different account types are confusing. I agree. I don't do any financial transactions on my page. All my music is gratis.

AFAIK, domain name registration is a yearly subscription service no matter who you go through.
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Re: Website builder / hosting service?

Post by raboof »

milo wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 1:19 am AFAIK, domain name registration is a yearly subscription service no matter who you go through.
This is true, but there are differences: each top-level domain (e.g. .com) is managed by an independent-ish organisation (i.e. ICANN). When you want to register your domain name, you typically don't deal with ICANN directly, you have to go via a 'registrar'. Often registrars provide additional services (like DNS), or hosting services can take care of this for you. You typically pay your registrar a yearly fee (and they pay ICANN a yearly fee) to keep your registration active. If you want to move registrars, you can 'transfer' your domain: for example, in 2016 I transferred linuxmusicans.com from xel.nl to inwx.de . This is possible because there are rules the registrars have to adhere to (and if they'd break them they'd get in trouble with ICANN, which for obvious reasons would be a problem for them).

However, there are hosters that offer to "arrange a domain for you", but register it for themselves and then attach it to your site. If you're with such a hoster you might not be able to transfer your domain so easily, and in extreme cases they might 'hold it hostage' or even take it away from you - though I'm not sure I've heard of cases where that actually happened.

Unfortunately I'm not sure how you can know beforehand whether a hoster will register the domain in your or in their name. Even afterwards, it used to be that you could check the domain was registered to you by checking the 'whois information' provided by ICANN, but nowadays that information is often not publicly available anymore ('redacted for privacy')
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Re: Website builder / hosting service?

Post by milo »

When you register through WordPress.com, you own the domain. My domains are registered in my name, and I could move them to a different host if I wanted to.
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Re: Website builder / hosting service?

Post by Death »

Thanks guys. That's some useful info and definitely cleared up a few things for me :) I'll have to spend a couple of evenings messing about with WordPress to see what I can do.

By the way, have you heard of Neocities? I thought it looked cool and cheap to use but you need to know HTML and I'm not quite sure what possible with it: https://neocities.org/
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Re: Website builder / hosting service?

Post by milo »

Don't be afraid of html. It's easy-peasy. If you can write a structured text document, then you can do html.

I remember geocities back in the day, but I hadn't heard of neocities. It looks like you can use your own domain name with neocities as well. I had a few free websites in the late 90's and early 2000's. Those were the good old days when content was king and Slashdot was still fun.
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Re: Website builder / hosting service?

Post by Death »

Yeh I'm kinda interested in giving it a shot for fun one night actually. I remember doing some basic html on Myspace back in the day but nothing too fancy. Maybe 'Thomas Myspace editor' is still knocking around somewhere so I could use that to generate some code :lol:

Yeh I miss those Geocities sites. Neocities looks to revive that part of the web. They have a good blog explaining it: https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2013/05 ... again.html I think it's a cool idea! It's kinda sad how most people only visit such a small number of sites these days where everyone's channel looks the same. I remember the transition when everyone just started using facebook and ditched Myspace and all the blog sites etc.
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Re: Website builder / hosting service?

Post by milo »

I miss those days.

WordPress.com has an internal social media-like interface where you can discover, follow, and comment on other blogs. Not sure that it works very well, though. I have found some interesting things and interesting people that way, but I think that most follows and likes are attempted self-promotion, just like with Twitter et al.
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Re: Website builder / hosting service?

Post by Death »

Yeh I actually did have a WordPress blog years ago and I remember using my account to comment on other people's blogs, even blogs that weren't on WordPress I think.. But yeh, you get the following for attention thing on most sites. Though I suppose the worst case scenario is you can just ignore them and your follower count goes up by one :wink:
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