Starting My Own 'Shop' Website

buglawton

well I'm busy setting up in 000webhost right now and can report that it's all very professional and well thought out.

Going right back to the OP though, maybe www.mrsite.co.uk is the right place to start for the quickest way to get an online retail operation going,

weegie.geek

There's no point discussing with people like this robt, he's right and we're suckers for paying for it. We do it for a feeling of superiority, because we like to !!!! away money, and because we're just not as awesome as samhale. Sucks to be us.

merrie_2

There appear to be many sites offering domain names for sale. I too am looking to set up a website, to sell my art, but am concerned I could pay for a domain only to find I don't fully own it.

samhale

weegie.geek wrote: »

There's no point discussing with people like this robt, he's right and we're suckers for paying for it. We do it for a feeling of superiority, because we like to !!!! away money, and because we're just not as awesome as samhale. Sucks to be us.

Naturally.

weegie.geek

I'd recommend namecheap.com - I've had great service off those guys. I did use estdomains but the service went downhill in a big way, and godaddy are good and similarly priced to namecheap, but I recently had to renew a .tv domain I own, and namecheap were a fair bit cheaper than godaddy, so I transferred it over to namecheap, and godaddy dragged their heels over the transfer something awful. Not impressed. I'll be transferring the rest of my domains away from godaddy when I can be bothered.

UpToMyEyesAgain

Strange how the original poster Batchy-Boy has not contributed to the argument, which I can see this has mainly become.

It's not often I'm right and I could be wrong this time but rather than a website and hosting either free or paid, would not a blog suffice?
Assuming Batchy-Boy does not have a warehouse full of stock, perhaps he is going to be using affiliate products or dropshipping, he doesn't actually say, but a free blog that you can name whatever you like plus free hosting, with no ads except what you put up, from blogger dot com, might be the beginners road to go down.

Just a suggestion. Not an argument contribution.

Markee

samhale wrote: »

The thing is, I'm getting 99.9% uptime.
If I wasn't, I wouldn't be with them.

By optimising my website, I don't need big bandwidth. My whole website network runs on free hosting, it just means less outgoing, and more money for me.

Just be careful with these uptime statements - 99.9% uptime could potentially result in 9 hours downtime per year! 99.9% sounds very good, but is not particularly good for something you really on to be on all the time (web hosting or an electrical supply for example), you should be looking for 99.999%which is potentially 6 mins of downtime per year - see what a difference that 0.099 makes!

robt_2

Markee wrote: »

Just be careful with these uptime statements - 99.9% uptime could potentially result in 9 hours downtime per year! 99.9% sounds very good, but is not particularly good for something you really on to be on all the time (web hosting or an electrical supply for example), you should be looking for 99.999%which is potentially 6 mins of downtime per year - see what a difference that 0.099 makes!

The free services only states 99% - the paid services offers 99.9% so it is even worse than they think .

buglawton

Well, this is a Moneysaving forum and not a counsel-of-perfection one, so I'm going to try out the free hosting recommended above. Have already started migrating PHP and SQL data there and have been impressed that many tools, features and live support are available that don't even exist on my current PAID hosting. Once I'm up & running my (free) website uptime stats monitoring service will report on the actual uptime, then we will see.

Is hosting a bit like house & car insurance, relying on inertia to retain customers?

weegie.geek

The hosting industry's a mess. Small hosts pop up all the time, but most are reselling other people's services.

They don't get the customers they expect, or just spend the money that comes in, so the host they're reselling doesn't get paid and the people they're reselling from pull your hosting, and offer for you to become THEIR customer, if you're lucky. If you're not, your account gets wiped with no warning.

People who thought they could make money doing it get bought over by other companies all the time. It's a business based on tiny margins, and you really need to be big, or doing something special that nobody else does, to survive.

Horrendous overselling is another problem. Offering 2000GB of transfer and 150GB of space for £3 a month is unsustainable. Look at what a dedicated server costs, then work out how many £3 accounts you could fit on it, then work out just how much it's oversold by. Assuming no profit's made, every account on that server would have to use a fraction of the sold capabilities of the package or the server would grind to a halt. True, most people overestimate their needs so go for larger packages than they should, but overselling is still a massive problem. It makes the realistic hosts look terribly overpriced by comparison.

Have a gander over at webhostingtalk.com - an eye opener to just how shoddy 90% of the hosting industry is. Pretty easy to spot the respected guys, and there are always good offers too.