web hosting advice

[bigoggy]

my website is on a free forum, so the web address is miles long, and doesn't show up in google search's, what i want is a front page that people can google, all it needs to do is tell them what the site is about and have a link to the forum, whats the easiest and cheapest way of doing this?

i'm a bit computer thick so be gentle with me

[Jamie.T]

www.Vodahost.com is in my opinion the best server out there at the moment. For $9.99 a month you get a FREE domain name and decent bandwidth.

There are a few free hosting servers around but from experience they tend not to be very good. Depends really on how much stuff you need hosting.

Jamie.....

[MatJohnson]

Why would it matter if it doesn't show in google? Your domain name is only part of your SEO rankings. Best bet would be if you need a shorter URL to tell people take a look at tinyurl.com and set one up there.

[blue_pinky]

I've been using www.1and1.co.uk for a few years, never had any issues with them, £5 per month hosting for their 'home' package, unlimited bandwidth, 100's of email addresses/mailboxes, 5GB of storage, etc. Buy your own domain name on top of that and your sorted as a sorted thing!

Costs a little bit more if you want any clever hosting features like sql/asp etc.

Bound to be loads of companies offering the same sorts of deals if you look into it though.

[Titch]

If all you want is a few megs to make a front page that will link to your forum which will stay where it is, then I can sort you out some space for about a quid a month.

Bear in mind though that a static front page wouldn't do anything for your Google rankings.. Google basis it's rankings on popularity, regularly updated content, page hits, links (and their relevance to the content) amongst a load of other things.. it helps to keep dead pages off the top of the searches, eventually all those mega old GeoCities sites which people set up yonks ago will disappear to page 5 million.

Personally what I'd do is activate the portal for your forum if possible (which software is it runing on? VB, IPB, PHPBB, SMF etc?) and then sign up to http://www.123-reg.co.uk/

Once on there, buy a domain name you like and just set it up to redirect to your lengthy forum name. People can remember the website, you don't have to move anything or create anything.. easy peasy.

If you ever decide to get your own hosting, if you use http://www.webfusion.co.uk/webhosting/ and go for the Pro package if your running a forum, then they are the sister site to 123-reg.. in your 123 panel, you type in your webfusion's IP and it sets it up for you, none of this nameserver 1 and 2 blah crap..

Also, if you buy your own domain name look into setting the email side of it up with google (they have specific 123-reg walkthrough for setting it up) You then have the advantage of using Google's Spam and Virus filters as well as being able to check your email away from home. Give me a shout if you want a hand setting that up

[jkonline]

A domain name will give you a new web address. You can buy one of these for a few pounds (from www.123-reg.co.uk) and point it at your existing site on the free forum if you wish.

Alternatively you can buy one and point it at some paid for webspace (web host). For this I use better webspace (http://www.betterwebspace.com/) only £15 per year (plus price of the domainname). You can either get a web address (domain name) via them or through reg123 but they will help you with that.

As for showing up in google there are a few things you can do:

> Make sure you have added your site to www.google.com/addurl/ .
> Design the site to be google friendly
> Have a look a googles web master tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) these will tell you how google sees your site and any pages that it may be missing. Also it will tell you what seach terms peopl use to find your site.
> Add your site to http://www.dmoz.org/ this is a list of sites that google, yahoo, bing and loads of other searchengines pull from to ad to their search.
> When you buy a domain name it helps if the term the user is searching on appears in your URL.

However all of the above will have to be repeated if you do this for your existing site and the register a new domain name.

hope this helps

[bigoggy]

this is what i have at the minute

http://www.freeforum101.com/forum/scalehaulersand.html

if you google it, it doesn't find my page, all i want is an address i can put on promotional posters and stickers and get people on my site


sorry if i sound thick

[terry.sc]

Originally Posted by bigoggy

my website is on a free forum, so the web address is miles long,

You don't want web hosting, you want a domain name which you can then point to your web pages. I use www.ukreg.com for all mine, their domain names cost £2.95 per year for co.uk names.
You can then point it direct to your forum.

Having a page hosted somewhere won't help you move up Googles rankings, to get high up you have to have a very regularly updated site that's popular so it gets lots of hits and lots of people link to it. If you are looking at attracting people from Google, Google won't be concerned how long the web address is just whether the site is popular.



One thing that I think is really important is to make sure you don't get your domain name from your web host. If you get one of these domain deals from a hosting provider you will find they still own the name and if you have any problems you end up losing your domain and website. By using a different company to register your domain if you have any problems with your web host you can point your domain somewhere else and still emails redirected to a different address.
A perfect example, the host I used for all my websites ceased trading after not paying the bills from the data centre, which meant the server was switched off with no warning. As my domains were hosted elsewhere I could just point then to a temporary holding page instantly then had my sites hosted elsewhere two days later. Many fellow customers who had their domains registered through the host still didn't have access to them weeks later.

[James]

What sort of site is it? I have about 500 generic domains like truggy.co.uk/truggies.co.uk/bashers.co.uk, which i buy and sell, it can aid search engine rankings, i've also acquired good names for people through dropcatching.