I have many friends who aren’t particularly techie types.  Actually, I have very few techie friends.  And they all figure I’m the go-to guy for their tech questions.  Hence, I get asked to “help out” with setting up web sites now and then.

At some point, it occurred to me that, while there were plenty of good vendors I could recommend to peope (I’ll even give a list of some below), if I suggested that a friend use one or more of these vendors, the friend would inevitably still have questions that were vague and not really tech-support questions, and they’d end up back asking me for help.  It’s much easier to help them if I don’t have to go digging through some hosting company’s control panel to find the one messed up setting that I could have fixed in 2 seconds with a command line…

So I should just provide these people with hosting.  This is how I entered the world of small, in some sense “boutique,” hosting.  I’m not a company with credit card processing and automated account setup and 24-7 tech support.  These aren’t mission-critical sites.  When I’m asked, “How do I go about setting up a web site for [X]?” I can explain the overall steps (get a domain name; get hosting; if these are separate, point name at host; make web pages; upload web pages), I can recommend commercial providers (list below), and I can add that while I can honestly recommend those vendors, I can also offer to deal with all the setup and hosting to the point where they have some control panel and can figure out page creation and uploading, and I’ll charge them something or other that we mutually agree is fair.

When things break, I can fix them on the server easily.  If they’re unhappy, I can help them move off to a commercial provider.  And, hopefully, what they pay me defrays the costs of the servers I’m already running my sites on.

Oh, and as a side note, unless you’re doing something fancy or getting a lot of traffic on your site, there is no reason to be paying more than about $1/month for hosting, and contracts longer than a year are probably a bad idea (except where the monthlies are so small as to make month-to-month impractical, say maybe under $5/month, or where there’s a deep discount for longer contracts, I strongly prefer month-to-month payment rather than yearly contracts).

Vendors I currently use:

• WorldWideDNS.net (DNS)
• No-IP.com (dynamic IP)
• RapidVPS.com (hosting)
• GoDaddy.com (domain names, SSL certs)
• LuxSci.com (email)

Vendors I have used in the past and think are generally good:

• ucvhost.com (hosting)
• No-IP.com (DNS, email)
• 5dollarhosting.com (hosting)
• hostrocket.com (hosting)
• fusemail.com (email)
• cheap-domainregistration.com (domain names)

This is all in stark contrast to my previous experience with script.aculo.us, wherein I was able to make some really nifty shiny stuff work really well without having to learn too much, but it was still all traditional client-server and nothing properly AJAX and all the workings of the javascript were so specific to script.aculo.us that I didn’t really learn any js.  jQuery seems much more straight-forward, even though it also seems to provide only a much lower level of functionality, though I did start to fiddle with animations with jQuery.

Hopefully, some jQuery and AJAX will find their way into some of my production stuff in the next few weeks.