Where should I host my website? I don’t know where to start.

Do I even need a website?

YES, yes and yes!

Well, the answer is no always yes. But if you’re asking you probably already know you do.

Great. now what?  I’m going to answer that with a question. How techy are to comfortable getting or willing to learn?

Free

They may have ads, limitations in design options and functions. It might not look as professional as you want it to. You may not get taken as seriously.

Self Hosted

With a self hosted WordPress site your design options are endless even if you change your mind every week.

I think of this like renting a house and bringing in you own furniture. Being responsible to lock your door and buy your own groceries. And if you want to leave you can take all of your belongings when you move out.

This can cost as little as 15.00 a year for a domain name and around 5-10 dollars a month for the hosting. WordPress it’s self it free.

Included hosting

There’s probably a better word for it but that’s what I think of it as. If you don’t want to worry about c-panel, updates, security and all that stuff. This is a good option. This is what options like Squarespace and Showit do.

I think of this like renting a house with included furniture.  They take care of locking your door and updating your furniture (sometimes it’s very cool!) But when you want to move out you can’t take any of the furniture, they keep everything.

With Both Self Hosted or Included hosting you have a lot of creative freedom.

1.DIY. If you are the type who likes learning, doing it yourself, are ok taking care of updates, security and don’t like to let go of design control this is a great option.

2. Hire out the design. If you don’t have time, or just can’t put your own brand together, hiring it done is a smart move. Do not feel bad about not doing it yourself! Most of us have a very hard time pulling it all together ourselves.

This can cost as little as 15.00 a year for a domain name and around 8-50.00 a month for included hosting and user intuitive website making tools.

What I did

I knew self hosted  wordpress was for me. Confession: I started with the cheapest hosting I could find on black friday during a 2 hour sale! I then found you get what you pay for! It loaded my site very slowly, sometimes people would just see a blank page!

Then I used Siteground for a while but they went down hill with service. I have since moved to Cloudways web hosting and have been very happy!!

Other good resources:

Web hosting I use: Cloudways 

Melissa Love’s make a website course with outlined steps The Design Space Site School course