How much do you pay for website hosting? Let's compare services and prices...

[haring]

I have 3 domain, 3 websites under my hosting plan. I pay 25.99/month at Bluehost. It is $311 for a year.

How much do you guys pay for hosting?

Thanks so much!

 

[Calzone]

So far zero, but your thread is of great interest to me as I plan to have an online presence in the future.

My gal began about 5 years ago with a fashion blog with Squarespace. Currently she is using the GoDaddy platform because of a contract. From what I hear her GoDaddy commercial is still running.

Earlier this year she retired from academia. She is a pretty big celeb today and is kinda "A" listed.

www.AccidentalIcon.com

Cal

 

[raydm6]

I'm adding this here in case it might help someone on a budget:

For anyone wanting to host a custom domain, you can host and build your website for free at GitHub.

GitHub · Change is constant. GitHub keeps you ahead.

Join the world's most widely adopted, AI-powered developer platform where millions of developers, businesses, and the largest open source community build software that advances humanity.

github.com

I did this this week and and happy with the results so far. My web site is a simple responsive HTML5/CSS design based on the Skeleton CSS boilerplate template:

Skeleton: Responsive CSS Boilerplate

getskeleton.com

I use Visual Studio Code (also free) to edit my HTML and CSS (you can also directly edit inside the github.io repository):

Visual Studio Code - The open source AI code editor

Visual Studio Code redefines AI-powered coding with GitHub Copilot for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. Visual Studio Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, macOS, and Windows.

code.visualstudio.com

My domain registrar is GoDaddy so I had to go in to my domain DNS mangement console and update my A, AAAA, and CNAME records to point to my GitHub repository (and also add a CNAME record to my GitHub repository). GitHub has pretty good documentation on how to do all this:

GitHub Pages

Websites for you and your projects, hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.

pages.github.com

and…

Configuring a custom domain for your GitHub Pages site - GitHub Docs

You can customize the domain name of your GitHub Pages site.

docs.github.com

I also created robots.txt and sitemap.xml files to control web crawlers and I submitted my site to Google through the Google Search Console and Bing's Bing Webmaster Tools for indexing.

Only out of pocket cost is only my yearly domain fee.

Alternatively, if you don't have a domain but want to scratch the surface with HTML & CSS, you can open a free account with neocities.org (sort of similar to the old geocities) and build your own web site from scratch - albeit under a neocities.org subdomain. They do offer custom domain hosting at $5/month.

Neocities

Create and surf awesome websites for free.

neocities.org

 

[mrtoml]

If you subscribe to one of the Adobe photography plans you can usually set up a simple website using Adobe Portfolio and point a custom domain name to it. I recently did this and I think it is OK for a budget option. There are lots of online tutorials to help with this. I wish I had known about Portfolio before wasting money on other platforms like Wix and Wordpress although they do give you more options. But if you want simple then this works fine.

edgeimages.photography is the site I set up.

 

[JohnWolf]

I use Ionos Wordpress hosting. $140/yr.
I like Wordpress.org for its ease of use, endless themes and plugins, and ability to tinker with CSS.

 

[JohnWolf]

A couple free options I’ve tried:

• Google Sites. I think it’s open to any gmail account holder.
• Tumblr. No ads, many photographer themes, and very customizable. And if you know HTML and CSS, you can do just about anything with it.