Family Website Hosting
When creating a family website, just purchasing a domain name is not going to be enough. A domain will give you a location on the internet, but it will not give you web space. In order to purchase web space, you will need to purchase web hosting. There are several different web hosting sites that will provide you with what you need for your family website, some costing money and others completely free.
Family Website Interaction
Most families create a family website in order to interact with one another. Maybe your family lives across the country or even worldwide, and the internet is your best way to stay connected. Or perhaps your family is very social and you hold many social events throughout the year. You will want to upload pictures, videos, and slideshows onto your website. In order to upload these kinds of media, you need to get web hosting. Web hosting sites allow these pictures and videos to actually show up on the internet.
When you buy a domain name for your family website, you might start it without needing a web hosting service. However, you will only receive a limited amount of web space. Most companies will only give you about five web pages. You really can’t do much with five web pages. It may help to get you started, but it won’t last for the long run. If you want full control of your family website, you need web hosting to support all your content.
Website Features
You may want to include features like blogs, calendars, contact sections, guestbooks, and comment sections on your family website. You will not be able to come close to including all of these features without web hosting. Each blog entry itself is placed on its own web page. Each day, week, and month of the calendar section is placed on its own web page. You could end up using more than fifty pages just for your blog. If you want more than one blog on your website, you will need even more web pages than that.
If you want to use things like HTML and JavaScript, web hosting is absolutely necessary. HTML is a coded language that represents the content that is on your website. You can write the HTML code yourself if you know how, or use a program to generate it for you. However, without web hosting, you cannot upload this code because it has nowhere to “live” online. Even if your domain provider offers limited space, it won’t be enough to store all the content for your family website.
Create a beautiful Family Website
If you are not a professional web designer, purchasing web hosting will help you out significantly. Many family web hosting sites provide programs that help you create your family website and make it look presentable. Writing the HTML code for your entire website is challenging, especially when adding features like blogs and calendars. You really have to be a professional to be able to do that. However, some web hosting sites offer programs that generate the code for you—just type in your website content. They also provide templates for your site. Most templates are professional-looking and really easy to use.
There may be other features that you would like presented on your website. These may include a web store, photo gallery, or forum. These are all things that you cannot create without the use of a web hosting site. Depending on the web hosting site you choose, you may easily add these features to your website. Some programs will be more difficult to use than others, but most of them are extremely easy. Some make it as simple as selecting “photo gallery” from a list and dragging it to your desired spot on your family site. Web hosting makes creating a really engaging site much easier than it would be without web hosting.
Web Hosting
It doesn’t matter whether you buy web hosting or use free web hosting, as long as you have some form of it. Your content will still show up on the internet regardless of how you obtained your web space. The benefit of using a free web hosting site is that you will not have to use any form of HTML unless you really want to. A free web hosting site will create all the codes you will need for your family website. Most features are just “drag and drop.”
If you want a picture in a specific spot, just click “picture,” upload it, and drag it to the desired location. Buying web space from a web hosting site lets you do more advanced tasks, like editing HTML code and using Adobe or Microsoft programs for design.
Interactive
A family website is usually an interactive and engaging site with many pictures, videos, slideshows, and blogs. These are very complicated features to create. If you are not a professional, you may not be able to do it at all. A web hosting site provides the space for your content, tools to create features, and templates to design your website.
If you are in the market for a website then recommend using HostOtter.com to host your website. We have been using them for the past two years and wouldn’t recommend anyone else. Their customer service staff is the absolute best, they have solved more problems than we would like to count.