Photographer's Website issue

[stoymigo]

I have a friend who is doing well at photography, doesn't have a website which doesn't help when ppl ask him for his website.
Just some questions

1.He already has an international yahoo account, should I host the website locally rather?
2.He has a .com domain, should I get a .co.za domain as it is not taken yet.

Thanks

Main thing I'm worried about is performance , I'll be using a wordpress theme but in the mean time I'd look at setting up a separate local-only
instance as well just to compare.

 

[ozziej]

Honest opinion, if most of his clients are in south africa, then host locally.
It will help with speed issues, you can often get hosting deals overseas for less than you pay locally, and you get nice bandwidth allocation, but there is definitely a speed difference.
I would suggest that you grab both the .com and .co.za , it helps with your accessibility and also makes google more "aware" of the site.

 

[EthanEllis]

From what I have heard yahoo offer terrible domain and hosting solutions. Moving from their service to any other service I think would be a smart choice and should save you some money. Thing is if you already paid and everything I would just ride it out until you need to renew then cross over. No need to be wasting money.

To answer you questions though. I would say just go with international hosting. The loading time for a local server and international server is basically the same to anyone with a decent connection. I honestly would not potentially pay extra for local hosting just so you get 1 or 2 secs faster load time. If the local option is cheaper then why not. If you going to end up paying more then screw it.

The domain in my opinion is not important. I wrote a post about why I think domain names don't matter as much anymore http://pixelbright.co.za/advice/are-domain-names-important/ also the domain does not have anything to do with how fast it will load. Its just a name that will connect to the hosting. Getting both of course is nice and is pretty cheap but don't feel like you have to go with .co.za if you running a local business.

One thing I would suggest for photography websites is that all the images be optimized for the web. There is really no need for 300dpi images on a web site. Also if you developing the web site maybe look into thumbnails that load each image instead of loading all the images all at once. There is a lot of other things that can effect performance other then just where you hosted so try fix up a little bit of everything.

-Side note read my blog www.pixelbright.co.za