[UFO Chicago] web hosting

[Greg Groth]

David Fourer wrote:
> I want to get a web host.  Looking for some pointers.  I don't have a 
> domain name but I don't need anything special.  I need more space than I 
> get free from my ISP (25mb).
> I've been doing photography when I travel and putting together pages of 
> photos and text for friends to view.  I like this a lot better than 
> putting the photos on one of those photo hosting sites.  I like to 
> control the arrangement of photos and text, control fonts and text size, 
> photo size and shape, for an overall artistic effect.  Eventually I 
> might add things like recorded narration or music???.  I also have a 
> small business but I don't advertise outside my neighborhood.  I don't 
> plan to make this a business site for now.
> It seems like any of the free or cheap 1-year or 2-year packages would 
> work.  I don't need design help.  Some day I might want hit-tracking.  I 
> might want to make my site search-engine visible some day.  I suppose 
> the free packages require me to advertise.  I certainly DON'T want 
> somebodies blinking banner on my page!  I don't see an issue right now 
> with bandwidth or storage volume.  It would be hard to fill a half gig 
> with images, unless I start shooting video, which I have no plans to do.
> 
> David Fourer

You don't mention what you're willing to spend, which kind of leaves the 
door wide open for a multitude of replies.  What I did was get a DSL 
line through Cyberonic (http://www.cyberonic.net).  Cost is $50 a month, 
and they let you do anything you want on the line, even run a commercial 
website.  A friend of mine got their residential service, and was going 
to run a commercial site on it.  I advised him to call and verify that 
he didn't need their business plan.  They said that the business 
accounts were priced higher for a uptime guarantee, and there was no 
restrictions on running a business site on a residential account.

I'm in the middle of playing around with getting my site set up, so it's 
not much to look at yet.  But I host my own on FreeBSD, and run Gallery 
(http://gallery.menalto.com/) for my photo albums (ports to different 
OS's are available for just about everything - even Windows).  I've been 
using it for the last 6 months, and don't have one bad thing to say 
about it.  Uses Apache/PHP/MySQL, and handles all of the 
thumbnailing/resizing automagically using plugins.  Really nice piece of 
software IMHO (free as in speech & beer).

Since I have a DSL line, with no restrictions on line sharing, I have a 
10 station network running in my house all behind IPCop.  Friday I added 
a new addition to my network, a G4 IMac.  My boss bought a new machine 
for his house, and brought this one into the office.  It turns out that 
Windows 2000 has some glitch with network printing and macs (I fought 
with this a while back trying to let our marketing consultant print from 
his Powerbook to our print server).  Since I'm running a Windows 2000 
server in my house, and the G4 came with OS 9 (I might have stuck with 
OS X), I installed Yellow Dog Linux and set up the G4 in the kitchen 
with XMMS & Firefox.

One question for the group, does anyone know of a Firefox flash plugin 
for PPC architecture?

Best regards,
Greg Groth