Domains and dolphins and servers and not dolphins.

[Hermie]

Hello Thumbians.

I am about to start my first foray into webmasterdom, which is why I'm requiring your knowledge about both domain registry services and server rentals.

This is for a Norwegian language gaming-podcast, so there are some guidelines.

-I need somewhere I can register .no domains.

-We're gonna use Wordpress, so I need a server that is MySQL capable, or even better, comes with it already.

-Since it's a podcast, We need somewhere with reasonable data and transfer limits (ideally: none, but can I even get that without lotsa money?) and the ability to expand these should we against odds become big enough to require it.

-And of course, somewhere that has good service, uptime, doesn't try to swindle or upsell us on everything, and all that.

Your suggestions?

And well, if you know any general mistakes I should avoid in starting a website/podcast, I wouldn't hate it if you posted them.

[elmuerte]

For static large file hosting you might want into something like amazon's S3. It scales in price better than the average hosting service.

[Erkki]

If you're considering getting a virtual server completely under your control (for MySQL or anything you want), I heard Amazon had first year for free or something for a virtual machine in the Elastic Cloud or whatever it's called. I might remember that wrong.

I've used linode myself, and can recommend it, if you know your way around linux. But for the domain you'd have to go somewhere else, don't know where to get .no domains.

[MrHoatzin]

I use Dreamhost for hosting. Since I realized what a disgusting piece of shit Bob Parsons is, I've moved all my sites to hover.com. Dreamhost doesn't seem to have any bandwidth limits and is pretty cheap, but if you start to notice stuff is getting sluggish, you can always move the heavy files to some cloud. That is my advice to you. Don't buy into complicated infrastructure unless you need it.

[Erkki]

I use Dreamhost for hosting. Since I realized what a disgusting piece of shit Bob Parsons is, I've moved all my sites to hover.com. Dreamhost doesn't seem to have any bandwidth limits and is pretty cheap, but if you start to notice stuff is getting sluggish, you can always move the heavy files to some cloud. That is my advice to you. Don't buy into complicated infrastructure unless you need it.

Seconded. Dreamhost is mostly good. Should be much simpler to manage than the ones I suggested. But it did get slow for me when I used it (even as the site had practically no traffic).

[Hermie]

Thanks for the tips, guys.

Dreamhost looks good. I vaguely recall someone complaining about them on Twitter, but I don't remember about what.

I haven't touched Linux before, so linode looks scary.

In the same manner, since I'm using this as a way of figuring things out, I'm kinda of scared to start delving into Amazon and such. The service sounds great, but I think I will stick with putting everything on one server until we start running into size issues.

Seems I have to stick with Norwegian domain services for a .no. Oh well.

Any other tips?

[toblix]

You know you have to be an organization to be able to register .no domains, right?

[Hermie]

I did not! Must investigate.

[toblix]

You have to be an organization to be able to register .no domains.

[MrHoatzin]

The only thing about Dreamhost that is worthy of complaint is the fact that they store control panel passwords in an encrypted fashion that is decryptable. If this is not a concern for you, step right up. It does annoy me a bit, but not enough to move all my shit.