Pelokee technoBlog

I finally bit the bullet and shelled out a few bucks for a real, hosted website. Over the years, I’ve always taken the D.I.Y. approach and utilized just about every FREE approach I could happen upon. Not really because I’m cheap, but more because that is how one goes about learning technology.

Some of my past websites have been hosted:

• On my home PC – This worked fgreat until my hard drive crashed and I lost everything. Being a seasoned and experienced IT person, I really have no reason to ever back anything up. 🙂

Self-hosting has by far been my favorite method of maintaining a website. After the $3.99 I paid for a domain name from yahoo, I was able to use a free service (www.no-ip.com) to work around the static IP address issue. A simple DNS forward made it work like a charm. Hosting the site on my own equipment also gave me the ability to host any file I could fit on my system and adding new content was the easiest it could possibly be. As far as website packages, I used .NetNuke, Macromedia DreamWeaver MX, and Microsoft FrontPage. I really did like all three packages and learned a lot by playing with them.

• On free hosting sites – Namely, Google Pages. Once you get a GMail web mail account set up, Google gives you 100mb of space with which you can set up your very own website. They provide you with templates and software that you have to use to create the pages, and they are relatively easy to get up and running. This is a perfect start for anyone interested in fiddling around with web design. This will get you started with a rudimentary understanding of the whole process.

In addition to free webspace, a GMail account will also get you your very own Blog site free of charge. This free blog package is extremely useful for what you pay for it! I’ve seen some fantastic things done with it.

I just learned of a WordPress solution that allows you to run it from your hosted service. Don’t worry, that’ll be up and running shortly.