Sales pitch

By Josh Reighley on January 10, 2006 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Having your own internet presence is not very expensive. Dreamhost offers very full featured plans for under 10 bucks per month. You can get your own domain name for about 10 dollars per year. Dreamhost is gracious enough to allow you to host unlimited domains on your one web hosting account.

Dreamhost now offers quite a few applications as one click installs. This means that if you want to create a common web app, it is often as easy as asking them to install it from a web form, and following a few instructions that they send you in the follow up email. These are the applications that Dreamhost will install for you:

WordPress Weblog
phpBB Forum
Advanced Poll
osCommerce Store
MediaWiki Wiki
Joomla (Content Management System)
Gallery Image Album
WebCalendar Calendar

I have installed tons of other Open Source PHP/MySQL based software on my hosting account. Usually you can install them in well under an hour.

It is nice to have control over your own email accounts as well. I can create an email address whenever I want, and point it towards a super secret email box that I never give out to anyone. If I start getting too much spam, I can simply disconnect it and set up a different one. If I get fed up with my ISP, I can switch. My email address stays the same, so my friends can stay in contact without constantly having to update my address.

Today, I was thinking it would be nice to have a place for my college friends to save their stories of living in the TKE house at University of Idaho. Dreamhost has MediaWiki is a one click install. Within five minutes, I had set up a powerful repository for storing all kinds of information. It may or may not take off... I am encouraging my fellow alumni to contribute. But I know that there is no technical impediment to it working. How many good ideas never come to fruition because the guy with the idea didn't know how to implement it?

The internet is a very powerful tool. The bang for the buck is tremendous, especially with all of the Open Source software that is freely available. Unless you are going to garner a tremendous amount of traffic, most website can be implemented with no additional cost above your monthly hosting fee.

Once you have a hosting account, the learning curve is not that steep. Next time you have an idea, you may be able to implement it in 5 minutes, rather than leaving it as just a dream.

Comments

I think it is time that more people start getting their own web hosting plans. I have hosted my websites on Dreamhost for almost 7 years now, and I think that it has been one of the best investments of my life. Having your own internet presence is not very expensive. Dreamhost offers very full featured plans for under 10 bucks per month. You can get your own domain name for about 10 dollars per year. Dreamhost is gracious enough to allow you to host unlimited domains on your one web hosting account. Dreamhost now offers quite a few applications as one click installs. This means that if you want to create a common web app, it is often as easy as asking them to install it from a web form, and following a few instructions that they send you in the follow up email. These are the applications that Dreamhost will install for you: WordPress Weblog phpBB Forum Advanced Poll osCommerce Store MediaWiki Wiki Joomla (Content Management System) Gallery Image Album WebCalendar Calendar I have installed tons of other Open Source PHP/MySQL based software on my hosting account. Usually you can install them in well under an hour. It is nice to have control over your own email accounts as well. I can create an email address whenever I want, and point it towards a super secret email box that I never give out to anyone. If I start getting too much spam, I can simply disconnect it and set up a different one. If I get fed up with my ISP, I can switch. My email address stays the same, so my friends can stay in contact without constantly having to update my address. Today, I was thinking it would be nice to have a place for my college friends to save their stories of living in the TKE house at University of Idaho. Dreamhost has MediaWiki is a one click install. Within five minutes, I had set up a powerful repository for storing all kinds of information. It may or may not take off... I am encouraging my fellow alumni to contribute. But I know that there is no technical impediment to it working. How many good ideas never come to fruition because the guy with the idea didn't know how to implement it? The internet is a very powerful tool. The bang for the buck is tremendous, especially with all of the Open Source software that is freely available. Unless you are going to garner a tremendous amount of traffic, most website can be implemented with no additional cost above your monthly hosting fee. Once you have a hosting account, the learning curve is not that steep. Next time you have an idea, you may be able to implement it in 5 minutes, rather than leaving it as just a dream.