Hi All:

I have an idea for a small free-lancing business, and it requires a web presence. I am bombarded with offers from yahoo., et al, for cheaply priced domain names and web hosting.

I have never created a website, don't do html, and never programmed anything harder than a VCR. I was going to hire a professional to create the website, using my text, as needed.

Recently, someone turned me on to GoDaddy.com. When you go to their site, they list a rather impressive, albeit short, list of awards the site has allegedly won. Other impressive stats include the claim that they have been the domain name supplier to sign up the most new names in 2002, 2003 and 2004, I believe.

They also boast of live customer support, albeit not toll free, which is not such a concern as I have "free" (unused) cell minutes at the moment.

So I called GoDaddy, and had a very informative conversation with one of their reps, after an approx. 5 min. wait (allegedly due to a special promo their running.) A nice feature is the offer to wait sans muzak, though they periodically break in with a short ad.

I learned a lot in an approx. 30-40 min. conversation with a rep, and his supervisor, whom I asked for, to complement the rep's professional service.

At no time was I pressured to purchase--it was mentioned exactly z-e-r-o times. I felt that they did give me good advice, and I truly think I will use them. The testimonials on their site must exceed a hundred in number, and almost all praise the cust. service, and all are very glowing, and I believe include first and last names, and the city of the user.

One thing that's not overly apparent when reviewing their products is that the seemingly lower-line product ("WebSite Tonight" hosting) is actually the one that comes with live customer service help, in that you're on their servers as part of the purchase price (3.95/mo. - 19.95/mo., depending on number of pages/capacities, before discounts for full-year purchases) for HOSTING. Whereas, if you go with the "Website Complete 5.0" option, (which is actually software, not hosting) it's actually not as good, IMHO, because you create the site on your hard drive, and must email it to them for comment/support, each time you have a question. I.e., they cannot "see" it in real time, because it is not on their servers, until you pay an additional licensing fee of $35.00 (one time) and get on their servers for an additional amount that I cannot remember. However, per the rep., moneywise, "Website Complete 5.0" was comparable to "Website Tonight", at least when comparing some of their respective options.

Not to get mired in the details, but I do wish to share my research, as I have my hand out for help: the above pricing for the "Website Tonight "product is NOT for a domain name. Domain names are an additional charge--like $9.00/yr, (not month!) but there's currently a special bringing down the first year to like $4.00/yr, with the purchase of another GoDaddy product. You can check out the other prices for yourself; I just wanted to include some frame of reference here, as I find it frustrating when people don't fill in some of the blanks in such discussions.

Another interesting product is their optional "Traffic Blazer" ($30.00 and up) software, which I think you have to purchase each year, as opposed to one time only. This product claims to help you test your hit rate with the major search engines, and optimize the keywords you choose to use, to rank higher with the various search engines "spiders" (kind of over my head here on the exact terminology). But this product, which was glowingly referenced in some testimonials, made me think I could actually build a site that would get hits, if my first attempt failed to do so.

My questions:

1. Has anybody had any experience with GoDaddy, for either hosting or domain name purchases?

2. Does anyone have an opinion re: GoDaddy's services for domain names and web hosting, as compared to the competition?

3. GoDaddy's offerings appear to be some form of "drag and drop" type of construction, into one of "190 professionally-designed templates." There's up to 2,500 pics to choose from, and some options allow you to use your own pics (I don't foresee using pics). But I must assume that these "templates" all look somewhat "cookie cutter", in that they're not custom-designed by some wizard. Does anyone think that's a problem? (I'm remembering how tacky the average yahoo "group" page continues to look--I'm sure GoDaddys' offerings look way better than that, however.) I'm just saying--do you think that if someone recognizes that you "built" your site for peanuts from "off the shelf" products, that that will negatively color the opinions of potential clients?

4. Can anyone think of any other reasons not to go with GoDaddy, over the competition?

Thanks in advance.

Peter

Hi,
I also signed up with 1an1, and am quite happy with them. I got the MS hosting business package, which is $10/month in the US and includes 3 free domain names, 2GB webspace (way more than I need), 50Gb of traffic (also much more than I ever expect to see), and 500 e-mail boxes at 1Gb each (I use a total of 4). I guess what sealed the deal was that the package included free software, especially Net Objects Fusion, which you use to build your site. It even includes templates for photo galleries, and an e-commerce module.

I had no experience with this at all when I signed up, but after a while, figured out how to use it to build a simple site. When it came time to upload the the second site (I have two now), I had a little trouble, called, and they walked me through the whole process on the phone, setting up directories, etc . They were very patient.

As far as templates looking unprofessional, it depends on how you do it. I just used the basic template, with the navigation already set up (they have a wizard that asks you what pages you want, etc. and then you can easily modify it later). I then clear off the text that they put in there and create my own, with some simple graphics that I create in Photoshop Elements. They also give you a graphics program, but I don't like it very much - not very intuitive. My feeing is that if you keep it simple, and learn the basic rules for fonts and keep the graphics reasonable, you can generate a pretty nice looking site with out much effort. Granted, it won't compare to Amazon for sophistication, but of course they pay a ton of money for that .

All in all, I haven't found anyone to compare on price and service. If you aren't comfortable building the site yourelf, or if you need to set up some database tracking or something complicated, you can probably get someone to do it for you for not much money, but then you are tied to them forever to make revisions.

I recommend that you spend a few days figuring out how to use the free software yourself, then it is effortless to make changes and upload it to your site. It's all handled in the Fusion software, just click "publish" when you make a change. Maybe a good compromise is to look for someone who uses the Fusion software, so you can make simple updates yourself later.

Here is the link: www.1and1.com (click on MS hosting)

Hope that is helpful.

Some good suggestions here - thanks!

We have had this discussion before on another thread, but I'd be interested in hearing answers to the following 2 questions from those of you with web sites:

(1) How do you think having a website will help - or has helped - you as a writer?

(2) Have you found that setting up and maintaining your site consumes too much time?

Oh - one more question: Is "web site" one word or two words?

Wow—excellent, thoughtful responses by all—thank you!

veinglory—thanks for getting the ball rolling re: 1and1—I had never heard of them before, but they seem pretty popular, if this board’s any indication--lol.

techwriter—thanks for the link to 1and1 and the depth of your answers. I’m also encouraged by the fact that you were a newbie to it as well. When you suggested I experiement with the free software, I wanted to ask, is that something you can do, on your own computer, before actually purchasing? I’m briefly reveiwed the site and I will definitely comb over it more thoroughly—I just wondered if I understood you correctly.

Bobkalsey: I read some good reviews of aplus.net and, unlike the GoDaddy testimonials I initially saw, these were on independent hosting review boards. Their flexibility sounds like a worthwhile selling point and you’re right—customer service is important to me. And not just because I’m hosting-illiterate--I worked for many years in Customer Service. If I have to deal with it again, I know I won’t tolerate poor service well—lol!

You know, since I orginally posted, I’ve run across multiple examples, on several forums, of very negative feedback on www.godaddy.com. I don’t want to reiterate it here, but one can merely Google godaddy and “review” to see it. It’s definitely made me reconsider my initial urge to merge with godaddy, as have the various repsonses to my questions, here. Having said that, some of the "Googled reviews" struck me as so similar that I wondered if it were not a single person on a vendetta behind at least some of them. That, or perhaps the allegedl shortcomings are fairly universal? Maybe someone reading this will come forward, with their own interpretation.

I will keep digging, and post my findings and/or decision, when I get that far. Right now 1and1 is looking pretty good, as well.

Thanks again, guys and gals. You really helped me out.

Peter

techwriter:

Thank you for following up. That's very cool that they let you try it for 30 days. I take it there was a promotion of some sort, so the $200. was waived? Can't beat that--it sounds like it worked out well for you all around!

I too would like at least a basic understanding of some of this stuff. It sounds like you've gone a little deeper than I had originally wanted to, but who knows? I'm finding it more interesting than I originally thought I would.

Other newbies like me might want to visit this site, which claims to be a "completely independed" reviewer of web hosting companies: http://www.webhostingratings.com/.

If anybody has any experience with that site, I'm sure others would be interested. I've just read a few articles off of it so far and, since I knew (literally) nothing about this topic a week ago, I found it very helpful. I'm currently slogging through their glossery of terms.

Thanks again, techwriter.

Peter

Sometimes cheap is what you get. I was hunting for a host for a chiropractor's site; the doctors pointed me to one that had been recommended to them. For $50 a month, you got the host, but there was no information available on the site about how much room, bandwidth, etc. So I emailed them and asked, and they referred me to a page on the site that did not answer the questions. Ahem. You should also look for a guaranteed up time--and it should be very, very high. You don't want your site to go down at a critical time (I've seen it happen). Your bandwidth should also be high. Some of the free hosts cut the bandwidth to force the site owners to upgrade to the paid service.

I did have Geocities/Yahoo and paid for the extras of having a domain name and no ads. I did some research and guess what? I'm paying the same on my current host (Verio) and getting far better service. I even have access to a very good Web site statistics program.

An additional note: Even if you don't foresee an impact of having the site up now (i.e., book not finished, etc.), get it up anyway. It takes six weeks minimum for the search engines to pick it up (assuming that you have devised keyword rich content), and it'll take a year or more after that for other sites to link to it, bloggers to post in their blogs, etc. If you've only got a few hundred visitors on a site and it's been up a year or more, you need to review your content and think about what you can provide to keep people coming back to your site.

QUOTE: Originally posted by Teslawriter

techwriter:

I had no idea about the lag times involved re: search engines and links. Very good to know, as otherwise, I'd have assumed I'd failed, in the first week or so after I got it up.



That's what a lot of people think unfortunately. The truth is that the longer the site is up, the better. The first site I put up was for an actor (it was on Geocities). He already had a built-in audience, so all I needed to do to launch it was post the link on a message board. We got about 200 visits a month. Over time, I wandered into actor link sites and submitted his, submitted it to search engines, and other sites picked it up as well. It actually stayed stuck on 200 for quite a while. When I moved to the paid host, I doubled visitors in one month. The difference in quality of service showed in how many people I got. Plus, with the domain name and not a standard freebie address, the site got a huge respectability boost (please note that if you were to buy a domain name that redirect, some search engines will still show the final address, not the domain name). There were actor link sites that considered the us a fan site because of the Geocities tag and would not post us. The site has now been up nine years, is linked just about everyone, turns up regularly in blogs, and hit its highest visitor count in January with 29K.

My writing site got about 50 visitors a month when I first put it up, mostly because I have it in my signature line on message boards. We did focus on simply putting on content that would get people coming to the site--in this, the popular content is on an aspect from the Civil War that no one else provides. Over a couple of years we went up to 200 people coming in each month, and it's steadily climbed. With blogs becoming more popular, the CW articles have been getting us about 8K a month. I've found us linked on school sites! That site has been up since about 2000.

If you ever want to find out who is linked to your site, go to Google or Alta Vista and type in: link:www.yourdomainname.com.

---

Linda Adams

Member of International Thriller Writers and Washington Independent Writers
http://www.hackman-adams.com
http://garridon.blogspot.com/

Contributing Author:
http://www.hackman-adams.com/linda/credits.htm

Oh - and I forgot to add that now I use Tiger Tech as my web host for only $75 a year or less than $7/month. It's a great deal and their service is awesome.

Publius:

I appreciate the recommendations. I have had to put my search on the back burner, recently, but I put your comments into my "to read" file.

Thanks again!

Peter

....it is "Web site."

Since I'm a journalist, I tend to notice those things. Yes, I should be an editor.

c.