yet another blog

Over the past few weeks I’ve been giving a hand to some folks who’ve been setting up their own website.
As its a commercial venture the project is “time critical”; that shouldn’t really have been a problem - were it not for the fact that they’re not terribly website-savvy, and I’ve only come in toward the latter stages of getting it up and running.

So what do I find? A raft of different domain names pointing to various seemingly random webspaces hosted with different providers.

Tidying things up a bit, we finally achieve some sort of coherence and all that now really remains is to get some scripts up and running, configure a database, and then replace the interim pages with something half-way decent.

Along the way though I’ve learned a fairly important lesson - one that’s passed me by before, presumably cos I’ve been real lucky in previous experience of website hosting.
And the lesson is that the choice of website provider is crucial!

The service my mate went for is, to say the least, not particularly user-friendly. The control panel’s bare bordering on skeletal, there’s not much in the way of help files, and there’s a real scarcity of useful add-ons.

Which is why I’ve been prompted to write this present blurb, cos I’ve just now finished setting up the basics of this present website, hosted by Heart Internet. (Apparently, its the same guys that first set up WebFusion.)
I picked ‘em originally, purely by chance, cos I wanted some temporary freebie space to get the site up and running whilst I organised (and got the dosh together!) a domain name etc and sorted out a few ideas.
A quick scan of my fav search engine threw up their name as offering 100Mb webspace free, without ads, without popups - basically without any of the normal rubbish that accompanies freebie services.

Well, Ive now got my domain name through them, upgraded to their Pro hosting service, and have been fine-tuning things to just the way I want them.
The control panel’s a doddle to use; there’s scripts in plenty and they’re just too easy to get up and running; the service is fast (and I mean real fast; and the prices are genuinely very competitive.

So if you’re thinking websites, give these guys a try.