What Do You Do For Hosting / Managing Your Website?

If it's just an info site that doesn't change often, it's hard to beat the prices and features GoDaddy offers. And their support was actually great the last time I called.

I wouldn't spend more than $100/yr on a site like that. 

As for success or challenges, I assume you are including email hosting for this question. If so then, that was, is, and always will be the challenge. Did you get my email? Where is your email? Spam this, blacklist that, and god forbid you get blacklisted with the spam filtering companies. Might as well change your domain name. 

I was about to say that is pretty darn good but then I saw your comment about it being a brick and mortar business, that changed my perspective. So basically if this is like an "online business card" type site then yeah that is overpriced.

if its just a simple non- ecommerce website, Godaddy and the likes are hard to beat. What real maintenance do you need that they cant offer? 

After years of designing our company site, and then outsourcing the design and maintenance, we decided to take a crack at doing our own.  We wanted to add banners announcing events, make changes on the fly, and have an impact with its appearance. Tried a few web site DIY sites and settled on Squarespace.  Very low cost, fairly easy to master, and great support.  The process is just like learning any new software...read the documentation, set up a test site, mess with it, get opinions from people you trust, and then publish.  A couple of nice features...they will set up your domain name, and have a connection with Getty Images.  You can then download zillions of images and videos to use on your site, with all royalties paid for.

Send an email to John H, and he will forward to me and I will send you a link to our site.

Have fun!

I've used Google Domains and HostGator.  Google was nice, because you could use all the other google tools as well, and email hosting on the Gmail platform was super simple. 

All, thanks!

Do you know if they handle upgrades or customizations of the website? My friend is trying to figure out who takes care of that. Evidenly the local guy he uses wants to charge him a small fortune for any change, it strikes me as a rip off because those things are fairly easy given who modern simple wordpress websites are built / changed.

We use Godaddy for hosting. We are actually able to host multiple sites under the plan, and its less than a $100 a year.

We had a guy built it on a WP we purchased, and he charges us $60/hour for maintenance. Updates, etc. He is more of tech/database guy IMO.

Now we have engaged a company that has better creative talent etc and is helping us on the visual side. They are charging more but I think its worth it.

I learned a long time ago, some things are better left to the pros. I work 60hours a week managing/growing my startup business. I just do not have the bandwidth to manage my own site.

My site is Joomla based and hosted on Siteground. They are known as one of the best Joomla and Wordpress hosts. Their base package is $4/mo, but I have the $6/mo plan because I sometimes host temporary sites for clients to check out. 

And if you need a simple update to your website, check out Fiverr. Super cheap for simple stuff like that. 

I have used iPage for hosting.  They are not ideal, performance is poor, technical support seems to based on another planet and cost is high.  We migrated over to SiteGround and the experience has been wonderful, a complete 180 from the aforementioned provider.

I highly recommend Fiverr as well for simple gigs and getting parts and pieces that you don't understand (or have the time for) done for you.  Also had good experience with related sites like 99designs and Upwork.

No matter what though it's nice to spend a little time learning how to do basic administration.  It isn't that complex to have a little wordpress site, especially if you use a drag and drop builder plug-in/theme.  Even doing a month at Lynda.com may not be a bad idea to kickstart the learning process - if nothing else it gives you some ability to keep costs in check and understand what reasonable prices are and the amount of work required when hiring freelancers.

Wix is a popular small business hosting option that covers website, email, and has a CMS for doing basic changes/updates.

Weebly is another one along the same lines.

Jimdo is also popular, though a bit more pricey for what you get IMO.