One of my recent projects was to help my son, Hunter, setup a photoblog. I came across a perfect domain name, hunter.photos, while browsing at Hover and purchased it for Hunter. I wasn’t sure whether to do a redirect, or park the domain, or find and setup an inexpensive domain hosting account. I took a look at Bluehost first because I had heard some very good recommendations, including one from James Williamson. Bluehost is likely a very good hosting provider, however, all of their options were too expensive for this project. I then went to GoDaddy to see what their cheapest hosting product cost. Yeah, I know all of the negative comments about GoDaddy and their racy TV ads and Bob Parsons‘ elephant hunting safari, etc. I have been one of its customers for a long time and I have also moved over half of my domains away from GoDaddy to Hover. However, I believe that there has been some changes since GoDaddy was sold and aside from still doing a lot of up-selling (though it seems like it is less than before), it seems to be an affordable domain and hosting provider.
What I did find at GoDaddy was a newer product called WordPress Hosting. For a low price of $1.00 a month if you purchase 1 year of hosting in advance, you get a WordPress hosting account. After the first year, the price will increase, but that is still a great price for that first year. I purchased an account and configured it for Hunter’s new domain name. Configuring WordPress was a snap since I had just previously been through the process for my business account. He was pretty excited when I shared the news with him and we began testing out some new themes and created some sample posts.
I will share more later in an upcoming post about our adventure in finding the right theme and photoblogging plugins that we experimented with and how we finally settled on the perfect tool.