Mega needs IT help

[Mega]

Anyone?.....Blogsite/Website?
Mike

[Munger]

Re: Mega needs IT help

(1) Go to www.blogger.com
(2) Follow the instructions.

That should do it.

If you want your own domain (i.e., www.megablog.com instead of megablog.blogspot.com), try dreamhost. $10 per year or so. Just register your domain and change the settings to "redirect" to your blogger site.

This should work for a while. If you start getting popular, you can look into hosting your own wordpress site or the like.

[Rekutyn]

Re: Mega needs IT help

(1) Go to www.blogger.com
If you want your own domain (i.e., www.megablog.com instead of megablog.blogspot.com), try dreamhost. $10 per year or so.

While dreamhost is probably fine for this, most hosting companies are shady when it comes to registering domains. Sometimes it is hard to take control of the domain yourself once you choose to move.
I like http://godaddy.com/ for registering domains. Their hosting is terrible. You can do the same setup as above for blogger.com with GoDaddy, except it's cheaper and you'll always own your domain yourself (as long as you renew it).

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Mega needs IT help

I like http://godaddy.com/ for registering domains.

A few years ago I switched from godaddy to namecheap.com. Godaddy was getting a bit too big and commercialized for my tastes. Namecheap provides name (DNS) services cheaply, reliably and "advanced", as their marketing tagline claims.

I agree that it is a good idea to keep ones name service separate from ones hosting companies. That way one can move hosting companies without hastles over keeping ones domain names. Once you have some domain names that you like or that others know about (such as thepythoniccow.us that I have, even though I'm not using it for much at present) then you want to hang on to them.

One is more likely to have to change hosting (ISP) companies, as both ones needs change and as that's a harder business to continue to provide reliably, with good service at low cost, while continuing to make a profit.

P.S. -- Godaddy does do better Super Bowl ads however, or at least did so last I watched (years ago.)

[don]

Re: Mega needs IT help

I have a related question to Mike's (and no experience). I have a book coming out soon (?) and plan on marketing mainly through a website. The website title would be the book's. Any pitfalls I'm missing in my ignorance?

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Mega needs IT help

I have a related question to Mike's (and no experience). I have a book coming out soon (?) and plan on marketing mainly through a website. The website title would be the book's. Any pitfalls I'm missing in my ignorance?

Have you already bought your website title, aka the URL?

If not, get it now, if it's not already been gotten by someone else. Only one person in the world can own a particular URL.

Go to a "domain name service" (DNS service) such as namecheap.com or godaddy.com and buy the name. It will cost about $10/year to hold it. Then at some later time you can purchase web hosting services at whatever ISP you choose (no need to use the site hosting services of your DNS service) and tell your DNS service to which Internet IP address, as assigned by your ISP, to direct your long held name.

Anytime I have some "cool new idea" for some web site I might do some vague time in the future, the first thing I do is buy the name. I've held some names for a few years and then discarded them, when I ran short of "round tuits".

For a blog such as Mega is considering, if I were he, I'd find an unused name (URL) I liked and get it now from namecheap.com (my preferred DNS service.) At the same time, I'd follow Rekutyn's advice and start with a blogger.com account (*). So long as your blog remains on blogger.com, point your URL there. If you hit the big time and run your own dedicated site with some ISP, you can keep your name and retarget it to your dedicated site.

(*) Well, actually, I'm not being truthful. What I personally would do would be to install and run my own Wordpress service from my web server ($20/month at linode.com) from the get go, but I'm an unrepentant computer nerd.

[don]

Re: Mega needs IT help

Thanks cow, great stuff!