#Intro
From many in the IT industry, documentation is key.
It helps yourself to improve, as you learning more once you have to explain what did you do; and it also can be use as a database, where you can find solution if the same problem raise again.
But if you want to contribute, you need to create a website, a channel or a blog to show the pubblic your documentation. In my case, since I don’t want to stay if front of a camera, I figured that the best way for me to upload my text file is to create a blog/website.
#My Goal
I want a website/blog cheap but reliable and fairly popular so the majority of issues will be discussed on the web. And I want it tio be easy to manage and create, I’m not interested to create a website by code as well as self hosted on my own server: too advanced for me.
#Choosing Host provider and website builder
I looked first at Squarespace and Wix as I’m using Squarespace for my e-commerce and my partner uses WIX for her website. The problem is they aren’t cheap and digging more into them, I noticed that you can’t migrate your website to another host provider if you wish to (as far as I understood).
I start looking for alternatives, I open the browser and typed “wix vs” and “squarespace vs” to see what other people where comparing them to, and WordPress looked to be one of the top competitor. I looked at it briefly and I noticed they have plans for £3/Month but they also offer a free plan; which will be my choice.
With that out of the way I needed to find an hostprovider and I remembered that while I was reading and watching WordPress review, the Hostinger host provider was mentioned few time so I went on their website and looked for more online review to have a better understanding of the company.
They start with the “Single” plan at £1.49/month, they also have their own website builder for free if you don’t wish to use WordPress, which is very good to have the option.
So far so good but I wanted to check some of the Hostinger closest competitor too, after many articles and video I ended up on this youtube channel: “Emit.Reviews” where he discussed some free option, altough he doesn’t recommend them as you are in the mercy of the provider when he needs to free up space on his server. After all, the price is very low anyway and I ended up choosing between Hostinger or WebHostMost plans. They are both at a good price, fast enough and most of all: they seems to easy to operate.
#Who did I select
After few back and forward I went with Hostinger. It was a close call as both company looked pretty similar, Hostinger is more established and as we talked earlier it has his own website builder if needed. WebMostHost is newer but apparently a bit faster thought.
Now that Hostinger is decided I only had to select the plan. I finally decide to go for the “Business” plan, after the 10% discount from Emit.Reviews I was charged £208 for 48 month with an extra 3 month free. Considering that WordPress is free it all ends up £4.07/Month and free domain for the 1st year as a plus. Because I select .me it would be £16.99/Year to renew the domain
Hostinger is pretty straight forward: pay, create an account choose the domain name and just wait that the website is connected. Which it took 5 min I think, as while I was waiting, I installed WordPress by creating the account directly from the Hostinger platform. Pretty straight forward here too.
After doing this I loaded my website and noticed that was already up and running so still from the hostinger page I press “Manage” button and in automatic, you are in WordPress.
From there good luck! In the sense that you can spend days just to select a theme and even more days to personalize it. I went with this one which is very minimal and with limited costumization. Which is fine by me as I don’t plan to do lots of changes in here.
#Conclusion
I didn’t address this earlier but having a website is also useful if you are looking for a job.
I know this post is outside the core of my interest, but I decided to to document it so other can see how easy is to create a website. It also could help to save time as I spent long time to searching and looking at the reviews. Again if you are like me I rather spend my time learning more on network and security than building a website.
It’s worth nothing that for just this website I could opt for the cheapest plan but I’m going to migrate my other websites here too as I can have up to 100 website under the same £4/month plan.
Infact I almost select the “Cloud Startup” where for double the money you get dedicated IP address, standard WooCommerce (instead of basic) and it also faster and has priority support to name a few but I selected this one as I can always upgrade. I ended up using wordpress instead of their own website as for the e-commerce I plan to use WordPress WooCommerce anyway.
At the end I’m happy as I thought was much harder, and mostly for the fact that from now on I can keep up with the documentation while I’m doing a project.