For my DOT com hosting I generally use Hostgator.com having purchased the basic reseller plan. This allows me to host 100’s of small sites. It’s a really flexible plan where I can create my own hosting packages so I don’t waste resources such as bandwidth allocation on small sites that are expected to get low traffic.

Another interesting feature is that you can let external sites use a database on your Hostgator account. This means that you can utilize free hosting that maybe has PHP but no database.

But why would you be bothered about that Mr Multivar? Good question…

The answer is that I wanted to set up a UK site hosted in the UK so that the IP address is GEO-located in the UK. I believe that this will help with search engine rankings for UK specific searches.

DOT CO DOT UK domains are cheap and I buy them through Heart Internet. Today I purchased a domain for around $12 for 2 years, plus I took advantage of their free hosting offer. So I have a hosted website for just $0.50 per month. So can I make a profit with it? Plus, what will it be worth in 2 years time? I think I may do OK

To get a better chance of finding an available domain name you may want to consider .eu but that does cost more but it also makes sense to use this TLD where you are considering having multi-lingual versions of your pages e.g. in German, French, Spanish and Italian.

The features of the control panel are like their paid hosting plans apart from the lack of a database. AW stats, email and all the usual good stuff is there. One major limitation is the monthly bandwidth of just 100MB so you need to avoid lots of large images and forget video streaming

The domain has separate DNS management so it’s easy to change the nameservers to point at Hostgator if need be.

Now I am waiting for the Domain name to resolve to the hosting which always takes ages for UK domains for some reason.

Update: it took about 10 hours, now it seems to be up at:

Win Money Online - winthemoney.co.uk

So there you go, some tips on setting up very cheap hosting for your domains.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 by Andy and is filed under Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.