Web Hosting
Every website needs domain registration and web hosting and it’s quite a good idea to purchase both through the same company. If you already have domain registration purchased before you sign up for hosting, however, the domain can be pointed to find your website at a different hosting company.
We recommend Dreamhost.com—and will include the costs of moving your new website to live within the website design quote for websites that are to be hosted by them.
Dreamhost offer advanced options that practically no other hosting companies do and they are ahead of the pack in keeping their software and security in top form. They make automated updates on your behalf and will revert your website to previous software versions if their robots detect any malfunction. Their control panel is slightly more suited to programmers than to non-programmers but it is getting more user-friendly as time goes on. Besides hosting, domain registration and email, they also offer cloud-storage of files. This is our number one recommendation.
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Sadly, we have lost enthusiasm for our former secondary recommendation, which was Bluehost. A decade ago, Bluehost were great—but their services are not what they used to be and there is nothing about them that we can recommend any more. They are more expensive than hosting companies that offer much better services than they do.
A couple of newer hosting companies that also seem to be highly regarded (especially for server speed, which is important) are A2 Hosting and GreenGeeks. They are also more expensive than Dreamhost but for the faster server speed they might be worth a try.
File Sharing
Sending a few files as email attachments is fine but when you have a lot of large files to share for an online project, a dedicated cloud-based file sharing service is a far better option.
DROPBOX
Dropbox is our preferred file-sharing platform and while we can set you up with a folder in our account, you may wish to set up your own account.
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