Kitz Forum

Internet => Web Hosting & Web Design => Topic started by: Chunkers on October 11, 2016, 03:14:03 PM

Title: Local charity - web hosting recommendation and domain registration advice
Post by: Chunkers on October 11, 2016, 03:14:03 PM
Hi guys,

Mrs Chunkers is now quite involved in a small "Hedgehog Rescue" local charity which works locally to save the little tykes and rehabilitate them from injuries.  They have a Facebook page but no website, not a big deal as most hedgehogs don't have internet access (j/k)

I thought my contribution could be to set up and pay for (hosting) a website, so I rather rashly said I would do it ..... without fully understanding the implications.  I mean I have created webpages, have mucked about with HTML, stuck some very amateur pages on my webspace before, can use FTP but I would really want this to be a bit more professional than that...... I guess the objectives being :


So I am looking for some ideas from my geeky friends (this is YOU) on the following :

Web host - obviously needs to be inexpensive and I don't think it will see too much traffic, I want it to be easy to update by the wife / others with news and other info - the ability to easily post regular photos, updates and (smallish) video's is important, I guess the videos could be hosted elsewhere e.g. Youtube.  Would be good to enable people to make modest donations online via Paypal.  I have very little idea what kind of server side stuff I need for this, help!  Is a basic package OK or do I need something else? GoDaddy and Fasthosts have offers on but I am open to advice as I am sure there are better options.
Update Tools : I can't see Mrs Chunkers hacking HTML but she is otherwise pretty IT competent with standard Office type products, what kind of software do I need? I don't mind spending a bit of money on decent software if opensource doesn't cut it to give her a nice GUI to use.
Domain name, it looks like the domain name I want is fully available so i can have .com / .co.uk / .org / .net whatever.  Surely the .com is going to be the easiest / most memorable - for me its all about people remembering it easily?  Some of the big hosting companies are offering free registration - is this a trap  ???

Any advice, do's / don'ts much appreciated.  Would be great to get feedback as I am still at the planning stage and could maybe avoid any catastrophically bad screw-ups.

Cool beans!

Chunks
Title: Re: Local charity - web hosting recommendation and domain registration advice
Post by: roseway on October 11, 2016, 03:38:20 PM
I really can't imagine that .co.uk is so difficult to remember, and it's cheaper to register. I use 1&1 for DSLstats, and the domain is registered with them too. The hosting package I have costs £17.96 for three months, and it's more than adequate for quite substantial downloads and user traffic. It includes PHP and so on.
Title: Re: Local charity - web hosting recommendation and domain registration advice
Post by: Chrysalis on October 11, 2016, 04:04:25 PM
I will host it for free with it been a charity, PM me if you ok with it.

No strings attached other than you pay for the domain name.  Obviously only legal content allowed, and I assume wont be large heavy content.

For a charity if possible try to get a .org.uk or .org name.
Title: Re: Local charity - web hosting recommendation and domain registration advice
Post by: kitz on October 11, 2016, 10:21:46 PM
Meant to post this earlier but got distracted & had to go out, post was still open unfinished and I was also going to comment on .co.uk but I see others have since replied.

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Is it a registered charity?  Free charity hosting (https://www.vidahost.com/solutions/charities)


A basic package should be sufficient.  Links to paypal and embedded Youtube videos should work on most platforms.

Re webauthoring tools, I dont know much about those Im afraid as I use software originally bought under students licence, and these days there seems to be a lot less free WYSIWYG html editors than there were.  Possibly the easiest may be to save word docs as .htm  and there are online editors that will convert Word docs to html for free by stripping out bulk code.

Many years ago I used Netscape composer which at the time was very good.  This has since been taken over by Mozilla so check out SeaMonkey


Title: Re: Local charity - web hosting recommendation and domain registration advice
Post by: NEXUS2345 on October 11, 2016, 11:28:22 PM
Nowadays that sort of stuff has been surpassed by the CMS systems such as WordPress and Droopla. WordPress is a good place to start and is easy to use, taking a blog style layout which can be modified using easy to use templates. That would be my recommendation.

I personally have a dedicated server which I run Ubuntu Server 16.04 and Nginx (pronounced Engine X). I get my dedicated from a subsidiary brand of OVH, a French company, who offer hosting from as little as £1.69 excl. VAT. Their panel allows for easy WordPress setup.

https://www.ovh.co.uk/web-hosting/modules.xml (https://www.ovh.co.uk/web-hosting/modules.xml)
https://www.ovh.co.uk/web-hosting/website/wordpress.xml (https://www.ovh.co.uk/web-hosting/website/wordpress.xml)
https://www.ovh.co.uk/web-hosting/ (https://www.ovh.co.uk/web-hosting/)
Title: Re: Local charity - web hosting recommendation and domain registration advice
Post by: Chunkers on October 11, 2016, 11:58:36 PM
Great advice guys,  lots to ponder over the next few days.

Thanks

Chunks


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Title: Re: Local charity - web hosting recommendation and domain registration advice
Post by: Weaver on October 12, 2016, 01:59:24 AM
I used to run a web site for a charity that my wife worked for. The hosting was provided by UKServers Ltd (trading as virtualnames). It costs £20 per year. They are fantastic, particularly good for email.

I can't offer much help with authoring. I wrote my own tools which would take XML sources and generate lots of XHTML and CSS files as output. It was a multilingual site in Scottish Gaelic and English.