Advice on website hosting please?

Garry Edwards

Garry Edwards

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Garry Edwards
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So, here's the situation. A family member makes high-quality craft items, currently sold only on eBay. She wants a website, on which she can primarily offer them for sale to trade customers, and perhaps later have another site that can sell them to consumers, and she has volunteered me to set it up:)

I would be grateful for any advice on which website builder/provider to use. My particular concern is that she needs to own the domain name (not yet purchased), we don't want it to be owned and therefore controlled by the provider, because I know someone who got sucked into this and now cannot change suppliers.

Talking now about my favourite subject - me:) I already run a couple of small club websites, I want something that's simple to set up and maintain, but I'm not completely incapable.
 
Just a general thought or two....

Buy the domain from e.g. from Namesco, from their portal you can setup a redirect to the separate hosting service.
Equals complete control of the ownership of the domain and the ability to switch should you ever need to to another hosting supplier.
NB I use Namesco in exactly that manner but of note POP3/IMAP is free but they charge annually for SMTP per email address.
 
I’ve in the past used 34SP.com as a host for band websites, initially a Microsoft Frontpage creation and then later ones created using Wordpress. They also enabled me to purchase our own domain names without any strings attached. Provided a very good and reasonably priced service with good service support too. If I had the need again, I would go back to them. So, worth checking out IMHO.
 
Garry Edwards said:
My particular concern is that she needs to own the domain name (not yet purchased), we don't want it to be owned and therefore controlled by the provide
Click to expand...

I've used Wordpress, Wix and Squarespace to build websites in the past. All allow you to purchase domain names elsewhere then point them at the site making it easy to point your domain somewhere else if you need to.

When it came to eCommerce, I found Squarespace to be easier to use than Wix. Both sites have hidden costs unfortunately - especially around eCommerce, so if your family member is interested in things like customer lists (so you can send discount emails to previous customers for example), discounts, and a couple of other things I can't recall, you may find the up front cost escalating as you buy addons. However site builders are much easier for me to use (and update) so the extra cost was worth it to me.

Self-hosted Wordpress required quite a lot of admin - especially when plugins stopped being updated by authors and I needed to find alternatives. Security updates need to be kept on top of, and (for me) I had to keep relearning everything every time I went back to it. It's much more flexible, and free (although you need to pay someone to host it), but the overhead of managing a website wasn't my thing - especially as I got older.

Hope that helps!
 
Many thanks for the very helpful info so far.
So, Namesco for the domain name, and perhaps either Wix or Squarespace for the hosting. I have some experience of Wix but find it awkward, does Squarespace have a similar interface? If so, then I may need to make other choices.
 
Garry Edwards said:
Many thanks for the very helpful info so far.
So, Namesco for the domain name, and perhaps either Wix or Squarespace for the hosting. I have some experience of Wix but find it awkward, does Squarespace have a similar interface? If so, then I may need to make other choices.
Click to expand...
I found Squarespace much easier use. Slightly less flexible, but handles different screens (phones, tablets, desktops etc) better. UI much simpler and more intuitive.
 
If I was setting up an E-Commerce site today, I'd go with Squarespace, there might be better value options, but for someone who wants an out of the box solution, Squarespace is the one that springs to mind.
 
My ecommerce site is setup with Opencart and has been highly modified to suite my needs and products. Doing it this way does mean I have to keep up with tech changes, updates, Payment rules like SCA etc. Either you need to know how to do this yourself or pay someone handsomely to do it for you.

However if I had a small number of products or something "hand made" then I would probably go with Shopify.
 
Hostinger is very good for hosting.

I was with 1&1/ionos for 20 years, but they are now poor and expensive.

They have good options for WordPress
 
We have recently setup an on-line shop for my day job selling classic car parts mail order. This is being done through Shopify and so far we have no major complaints.

Whilst we are probably paying more than self hosted methods, its a robust solution that requires no time on our part to maintain, leaving us able to concentrate on the products and other aspects of business, rather than looking after the running of an e-commerce website. Ours is linked to our existing stock control and accounts package (Microsoft 365 Business Central)

I've reently moved my own website from 1&1 to Siteground and my wife moved hers from TSOHost (once great, now not) to Siteground and we share the package.
 
Thanks for all the help. I've pretty much decided that Squarespace will suit our needs, maybe not the best but probably the most suitable.

I haven't actually done anything yet, I can't design the site until I have data, so I'm waiting for that.
 
You can try something with WordPress hosting that would be pretty good even when we decide to change the hosting company for any service related issue.. that wont be possible with wix or squarespace need to think about it.
For WordPress hosting I personally use Webhostuk.co.uk pretty good company when it comes to customer support and hosting service.
 
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