Starting my first website - costs

[Mike]

Ok, so I'm going over the costs for my website to get up and running in Excel. These are the costs I have so far. (I realize these aren't the exact costs, they're just estimates. But please tell me if I'm way off on the estimates)

Webhosting - datawebpro.net $120
Domain - godaddy.com $10
XsitePro $197

Total $327

Anything else I should purchase, or keep in mind?

Thanks

-Mike

[Mike]

I think my best plan would be to get XsitePro right now. Built my site, and when I'm ready as it should be 90% planning 10% action. Do you guys think XsitePro would be a good choice? I heard they have a good tutorial, and manual. Even though I'm not a complete newbie at html.

[richerbrat]

Here's my two cents. XSite Pro is great for people starting out who have never constructed a website before and who want to get their site up quickly. It is not for everyone. I would not use it for all my sites, as the layout is too limited.

My costs per site per year for construction and layout. Microsoft Frontpage - about £180 - it will be cheaper for you American's - I use some html too, to make it search engine friendly.

Godaddy - $8.95 per year for domains, plus i pay the $1.95 a year to make them private, then i don't get people looking up my sites and copy catting.

I forget the name of my domain company - something like sonic pro - it's on my site, anyway. They have a special offer on for a year of hosting for only $50, or you can pay monthly. I register my domains with godaddy first and their hosting service only costs me $30 a year. It's reliable and comprehensive, and a huge bargain.

Other costs - you can buy numerous marketing materials as you go, but you can get these out of your marketing budget once your site starts to make money. And learning too is important - especially if you have no marketing experience. You should definitely set aside a chunk of your earnings for learning and reading, each year, every year, no matter how much of a genius you think you are, you should never stop wanting to learn. Rosalinds ebook is highly regarded on many other affiliate forums, so it may be worth you starting with that one.

[A Posse Ad Esse]

You'll want to look into an autorespnder at some point to setup and maintain a mailing list to bring people back to your site.
Take a look at AWeberhttp://www.netprofitstoday.com/marketing-tools/Aweber-.html , it's widely regarded as the industry leader...plus Ros uses it

Prices are around US$20/mo to $180 for the year.

You could also cut your hosting bill to $84 by going with LunarPages, 100GBspace (upto 500), 400GB/mo bw.
Okay, you probably won't use anywhere near these figures but they have fantastic customer service, an active forum knowledgebase and have been going since 97.
...I should really join their affil program lol

[Mike]

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hi,

If costs are a big concern, I'd go with Mozilla (the Firefox HTML composer) and opt for Aweber's autoresponder service.

HostGator is another web host that offers CPanel hosting for $8.95/month.

With CPanel you can set up a blog or CMS and with a little HTML knowledge avoid needing an HTML editor at all.

Cheers,
Ros

[A Posse Ad Esse]

Have you had much experience with Hostgator Ros?
I actually just did a search for Lunarpages on google (As opposed to the "Lunarpages reviews" I did to decide initially) and found a rather troubling page at number 2.

I'm still within my 30 day moneyback period and I'm looking at cancelling and going with the baby gator or hatchling instead.
Lunarpages may well be a decent host, I just don't fancy taking that risk with my first site.

Sorry Mike, Lunarpages may not be your best bet. I'm afraid it may be a case of cheap but not-so cheerful.
Ultimately you can use your own judgement but I'll be moving before I upload my site.
I don't trust a company that registers dummy domains similar to sites that give it poor reports.

Cheers for the wake up call Ros, if I hadn't have lookd at the Hostgator site I would have blindly followed the big numbers.

[Mike]

Hostgator looks like my choice of host as of right now. Anybody else have any experience with hostgator?

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hi All,

I haven't had direct experience with HostGator, however I did read a ton of what looked like unbiased and honest user reviews... through a couple of different affiliate sites (of course).

They seem to have very good email support and I'm impressed with the Live Chat feature.

There didn't seem to be many other good solutions out there that offered CPanel on a shared account.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ros

[Mike]

[boysbach]

Mike we moved to hostgator a month ago and opted for the resellers package which means we can host as many domains there as we like plus we can sell space should we wish. I have had no problems with it. I used the blog and within a few minutes it was set up in basic format need more time to tweak it.
Have you checked out the templates because there are some with them, not checked them myself but it might be helpful.
All in all we have had a positive time with them
Bev

[Mike]