I am looking to pay for my site for a lifetime, most sites like weebly and wix have monthly fees and sometimes they will do a website for a year for an amount decrease, but I want to just pay for my website completely and have complete ownership and access to the site. Anyone know how to do this? thanks. a
That’s a hard one to sort as everything changes over time. Even the best bricks and mortar companies go under and in the online industry they go under faster.
Free web hosting used to be quite the craze with geohosts but even they went down hill and disappeared. it was a place that was almost as permanent as you can get.
As you mentioned annual hosting can work a little bit cheaper but whatever you choose, I suspect you will be moving hosting a couple of times in your lifetime just like you move internet provider.
Possibly blogging site may have a long term arrangement but no company is immune to take over bids.
good luck
I will be interested to see what you find.
Have you looked into getting a Mac mini and just setting up your own server?
It’s only 20 bucks plus the Mac.
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most sites like weebly and wix have monthly fees
yes… stay away from Wix and other similar “service” companies. they seem cheap in the beginning, but they will keep leaching more from you and will lock you in by making it difficult to move your site anywhere else.
that said, you can’t get away from monthly fees entirely. it is not free to connect to the internet. you will always have to pay someone to connect your host to the web each month. some may try to hide this fee in a “free” host (usually by injecting ads and/or tracking into your site – yuck!!!) but the cost is there somewhere, just hidden under a layer of marketing.
but, what you definitely can do is minimize that cost. pay for just what you need. and find a provider that’s honest without scams or hidden fees.
Co-Location – paying to put a physical server in a room
as @AngelArs suggested, there are some great places like Mac Mini Colo https://www.macminicolo.net/ that will connect a machine that you own to the net. this means that you aren’t paying a monthly fee for the machine – because you actually own it. the downside is that you have to buy that machine, pay for upgrades, and fix it when it breaks down. the upsides are real ownership and unlimited control over what machine you buy and how you set it up. but Mac Mini Colo has been around a long time. They’re great. And if co-lo is what you’re after, especially if you want to keep it all Mac, then they’re the best.
VPS - Virtual Private Server
for myself, i like this idea, but the maintenance and upgrade costs of the machine are just a bit too high for me. i opt for a VPS (virtual private server). this is where companies give you a virtual slice of a machine – but that slice is all yours. you can install whatever OS you want onto it, run whatever software you like, and even use it for non-web hosting stuff (I run my son’s MineCraft server on one).
it’s one of the most economical ways to host a high performance site and gives you complete control. i use Digital Ocean It’s $5/month for their basic VPS – which is plenty for a small/midsized site serving static content like RapidWeaver. And there are lots of options for scaling if you are lucky enough to need more bandwidth or more CPU or anything else.
Basically, I like it because it’s straightforward. You pay exactly for the bandwidth you use, no more. If you need a faster machine, you can have that and it costs a bit more. Same thing if you want more storage space. No hidden costs, no ads or funny-business.
shared hosting – an old-school style web host
VPS is pretty great, but if you’re just getting started and don’t have much technical expertise, then a shared hosting plan like DreamHost is probably best. they might charge a bit more and might give you a bit less, but they will set up everything for you and make sure things keep running. if you don’t really want to learn about how to set up a server, or fix things when they break (and oh… things will definitely break LOL), then paying someone a little bit each month can save you a lot of headache.
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Before I found RapidWeaver I looked at a lot of the canned sites like wix and weebly. There was another one also called Duda.
The fine print in Duda says that they own the copyright and intellectual property rights to whatever they host on your behalf. It said they could sell whatever you post to whoever they want to and the rights of ownership for your data could be sold to whoever they want.
They offered you the ability to park cookies onto whoever visits your site. They could harvest whatever information they want from whoever visits your site.
This is creepy stuff.
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holy moly. that kind of stuff… i just have no words.
i always wonder how those people sleep at night.
in case it was ever unclear, you can rest assured that i would never do anything creepy. Stacks builds nice web pages. they’re all yours. you can do anything you want with them.
i’m a big proponent of the “Open Web” movement. the freedom to keep your own creations and do what you want with them seems pretty fundamental.
if you’re interested in that sort of freedom stuff you should definitely follow along with http://Micro.blog and Manton Reece that creates it.
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