Be our guest..be our guest! 20/20

Choosing hosting was pretty much the worst. Basically, it seems like most of the hosting site are similar in what they offer and it was hard for me, not knowing a lot about this kind of stuff to recognize what the most important difference were. Once, I figured out that some of the builders came with hosting and others didn't that made it less confusing. Still, I wasn't sure and it made me second guess what site builder I wanted to use. So I called my brother and got his advice and his advice was to use part of his hosting while I'm developing the business with mom because initially I won't need a big, fancy host and if the business takes off, it's not hard to get new hosting because I'll just be using his.

I decided to use wordpress because previously I'd wanted to use bigcartel or squarespace but talking with my brother I realized bigcartel doesn't give you a lot of space ot post product, unless you pay A LOT a month and we have a lot of different stitch markers so we need lots of product posting. Squarespace was limiting too. So I decided to just use wordpress because my brother said there are actually quick a few free shopping cart plugins you can use in wordpress. So basically, I'll just have to purchase the domain name initially, which is awesome.

So the web hosting that he uses, and I'll be using is called westhost. These are what there services advertise:

If I was going to purchase the hosting from them I'd probably go with the "Preferred hosting" option because it gives you a good amount of disk and bandwidth space and it gives you a free domain name. But since I'm just getting into my brothers account, I don't have to worry about it.

So I'm not having to worry about a set amount of time with this choice either. If my mom's stitch markers take off then we can reevaluate what kind of space we need and can afford to buy bigger or feel confident about a contract.

I can get support from the company via phone or email but probably also from my brother. The hosting doesn't come with any adwords money though.

I like this because it'll help learn how to set up my site with hosting and a domain name for a very low cost. I get to familiarize myself with the process so when I do need to purchase my own I'll understand how all the components work together.