New Years Resolution time: Building my own sites

[smb3]

So that time of year where I have a bunch of new years resolutions and hope that next year is a good year.

So I always wanted to startup a website of sorts but this year I want to put some backing into it. I want to try a mix of wordpress hosters and something that can give me a bit of flexibility over the year. Effectively cheap hosting over the course of the year to try out ideas.

So one element is the cost. What's the ballpark figure to budget for small sites?

Other piece of advice is what are decent ways for monetization on sites? I don't expect to rake in anything at all, but more for experience with such services. If there are alternative monetization models that I can read about then feel free to suggest those as well.

Hoping that all of us become successful and better developers in 2017

 

[Nick333]

Get a Cybersmart free hosting option. It'll just cost you the domain name. It'll be fine for most things including wordpress.

 

[Thor]

Wordpress you can start out for free including the domain - https://wordpress.com/pricing/

Free hosting - cybersmart + 70 odd bucks for a domain from domains.co.za so less than half of what cybersmart charges or if you want I can give you access to one of my many domains for free assuming this is just for playing around and the actual domain name is not all that important.

 

[Darko]

Axxess offer free .co.za domain and first 6 month hosting at 50% off. Doesn't really get much cheaper than that.

Monetizing starts with google adwords, but I think you need content first.

 

[Thor]

Axxess offer free .co.za domain and first 6 month hosting at 50% off. Doesn't really get much cheaper than that.

Monetizing starts with google adwords, but I think you need content first.

You mean adsense.

 

[semaphore]

You mean adsense.

No he means adwords. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdWords)

 

[halfmoonforever]

No he means adwords. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdWords)

No he means adsense. Adwords is used if you want to advertise your website/services. Adsense is used to monetize your site where you can get revenue from other people using Adwords to advertise on your site (hence the need for content to generate matching ads for people to click on)

@OP, Avoid Shared Hosting. Go with DigitalOcean, they're cheap and there's a ton of tutorials on how to setup your sites from scratch. I guess if you want to be lazy you can go the shared hosting route, but I've seen many many people get popular with their site and then the shared hosts starts limiting them quite drastically (to the point where google thinks your site is too slow/can't be accessed) and then you lose all that ranking power just because you share 1 server with 3049879 other websites.

 

[Thor]

No he means adwords. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdWords)

No.

 

[flippakitten]

How to monetize your site.

Step 1:
Sell something people want to buy.

Monetizing done.

You can now spend your time learning and developing software.

Anyway, it's really hard to monetize a site effectively unless you have loads of traffic, so you'll need to be patient and build something that calls people back.

There are plenty of ways to do it and it really depends on your market
ie. If you're aiming at hippies, having ads about BMW's isn't really going to go down well.

 

[IndigoIdentity]

it's really hard to monetize a site effectively

It's really hard to monetize things period. If it was easy then everyone would be silly rich.

I think a lot of people get caught up in the trap of thinking like oh I have this idea, i'ma make it a big secret so only I know what's going on and then i'm going to do all the work and then then be rich...

Wellll... In reality, there's generally a lot of time and planning and trails and errors before you ever get to the point where you can see a cent from your effort. Even if you get to that point, gotta think about how long it took to get there and what it is exactly that you accomplished.

Idea's are a dime a dozen lol. The ability to execute them effectively is golden and it's something that will take time and experience to achieve.

Anyways, I think it's good that you're planning to fail and if you do then so what... Can't really go wrong there and you're right, you're gain a lot of experience in the process (see above why this experience helps).

How much does it cost to get going? How much does a domain cost, do you have design experience or will you be buying logos and graphics and things, how much is your time worth to you? Check out AWS, you can setup an EC2 instance with a lamp stack, free for a year... Many other useful things in the free tier too.

 

[Darko]

No he means adwords. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdWords)

I think I kinda did mean adsense.

 

[smb3]

Okay, been looking at the suggestions (thanks everybody ):

Wordpress.com -> Free wordpress yes, but you can't play with plugins unfortunately so the flexibility is out of the window.
Amazon -> Yes the free tier would work, but my free tier expired long ago. Didn't check if the same free tier concept exists on Azure.

Axxess -> 6 months hosting free + free .co.za domain ... limited to 5 sites
DigitalOcean -> cheapest is $5 ... I find this to be the most flexible in terms of technologies that you play with
Afrihost -> Some cheap options there also. Only checked here because I was looking at ADSL prices

Didn't try Cybersmart yet.

Have yet to check the monetization options. So far only AdSense and Affiliate styles are on my checklist.

 

[AuraHost]

Wordpress is a great platform. But make sure you have some nice security plugins, do regular backups and check with your hosting company about your resource allocation.

 

[S1ght]

Okay, been looking at the suggestions (thanks everybody ):

Wordpress.com -> Free wordpress yes, but you can't play with plugins unfortunately so the flexibility is out of the window.
Amazon -> Yes the free tier would work, but my free tier expired long ago. Didn't check if the same free tier concept exists on Azure.

Axxess -> 6 months hosting free + free .co.za domain ... limited to 5 sites
DigitalOcean -> cheapest is $5 ... I find this to be the most flexible in terms of technologies that you play with
Afrihost -> Some cheap options there also. Only checked here because I was looking at ADSL prices

Didn't try Cybersmart yet.

Have yet to check the monetization options. So far only AdSense and Affiliate styles are on my checklist.

Another alternative to Digital Ocean, Amazon released an equivalent type of VPS offering.

https://amazonlightsail.com/

 

[IndigoIdentity]

Another alternative to Digital Ocean, Amazon released an equivalent type of VPS offering.

https://amazonlightsail.com/

Failing to see how this is anything other than an EC2 instance with some hosting focused specs and a slightly better price than the on-demand costs. Am I wrong?

That being said, it would still be cheaper to prepay for a reserved instance unless theres some special extras involved.

 

[S1ght]

Failing to see how this is anything other than an EC2 instance with some hosting focused specs and a slightly better price than the on-demand costs. Am I wrong?

That being said, it would still be cheaper to prepay for a reserved instance unless theres some special extras involved.

Think of it as the beginners EC2. It essentially just wraps up a lot of what you could do manually through the AWS console.

 

[IndigoIdentity]

Think of it as the beginners EC2. It essentially just wraps up a lot of what you could do manually through the AWS console.

Ah, that would make sense then. I was going through some invoices the other day and noticed the growth of Digital Ocean offering. In the past few months they have gone from like 100-150k invoices a month to nearly/over a million. Sooo, it seems that Amazon has taken this growth to heart and created their own, rival product?

Kind of a bs move as most of these companies are using AWS anyways...

EDIT:

I predict, Amazon builds competitive product, later buys Digital Ocean for customer base.

Are we able to buy shares in Digital Ocean?

 

[Spacerat]

Doesn't seem like Lightsail or D-Ocean supports a Win/ASP.NET stack ..?

 

[S1ght]

Ah, that would make sense then. I was going through some invoices the other day and noticed the growth of Digital Ocean offering. In the past few months they have gone from like 100-150k invoices a month to nearly/over a million. Sooo, it seems that Amazon has taken this growth to heart and created their own, rival product?

Kind of a bs move as most of these companies are using AWS anyways...

EDIT:

I predict, Amazon builds competitive product, later buys Digital Ocean for customer base.

Are we able to buy shares in Digital Ocean?

Nah. Why buy what you can outcompete with time