Low cost hosting

At this day and age almost everyone has a website. Many hosts offer great deals with reasonable prices, but if they offer exceptional deals with extremely cheap prices, beware before you become a victim. Web host scams are plenteous, so take caution.

You should research the host before anything. Go to forums and look for ratings and reviews before you commit. Search for the host name on a search engine and find out as much as you can about them. Examine their site carefully, and get to know who they are. There should always be a section that says “contact us” or an “about us” that has some kind of contact information. If you have no way to reach them, how can they be held accountable for things that may go wrong, or even help you with a problem? That’s a major red flag.

Always read the terms of service before signing up. Do a close reading and be sure that you understand payment terms, what you are required to do, and what they promise to offer. You should not have to keep track of and report down time. If the host is shady about uptime, don’t sign up. Make sure the domain name is registered to you and not to the hosting company. It’s not a real sale and you don’t own it if they keep the registration. This is also away of avoiding legal tracking. They can deny the sale if you don’t hold registration rights. You should have the option of paying monthly, not just annually. Although there is nothing wrong with an annual payment, be sure that you have options so that you can be sure the host won’t take the money and run. You should also be able to get a refund of the first 30 days of the membership. If you are not satisfied, you should be able to cancel and get your money back. Non-refundable deals are usually poor deals.

There is no such thing as unlimted bandwidth or data transfer. Check the terms and conditions for the actual limits. Data transfer costs webhosts money, so there is no way that they can successfully run business and make a profit at all with extremely low income. If they promise you limitless space, it’s technically impossible. It is a certain con for your money.

You should try to find a web host located near you. It will speed up the download of your site for viewers, give greater access to technical support, and assistance with service complaints. Extravagant offers for extremely low prices are a pretty obvious sign that the website is a scam. If you feel that you have been scammed, you should contact your local district attorney. Otherwise, research the site and don’t give your information until you have taken the precautions described above. Have a good time, but play it safe.

Starting out as a photographer, your first expense is a camera, of course.

Free photo editing tools also exist on the net – Photoshop is great but expensive. Try GIMP and PhotoFiltre and Picasa – Picasa is mainly a good way to find your pics but it has some excellent basic editing tools which are often enough on their own. There are others you can look at but these are the ones that I have found useful.

But if you then want to sell your photos or products using your photos, printing quality prints that you haven’t yet sold can be a huge investment.

And if you want to promote yourself online, then that can be another expense.

Now there are quite a few print-on-demand sites that can take care of that, yet not all produce all the items that you want.

So if you are new to this what should you do?

In my opinion, the best print-on-demand site for artists and photographers is RedBubble.com – it is user friendly and social and the results are excellent quality. However, they do not produce gift items like mugs, keychains, though they have expanded from t-shirts to include hoodies.

Zazzle.com has a range of gift items, including clothing items like shoes and ties.

FinerWorks.com will also allow an even wider range, jigsaw puzzles, keepsake boxes, etc.

Oh fine, so now I’ve spread my stuff over three sites. Well, it is an improved online presence, but even better is to have a single site that can ties all of these together. So now you want your own site. There are plenty of free-hosting sites to start you up – you pay extra when you can and upgrade.

And don’t forget to keep taking photos – this web business can take up a lot of time.

Also, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) – link them to your site – they are a great way of getting noticed, especially if you are a very social person.

You can check out an example at Smallfox Photography and see if you like the result. However, as I said, there are many, many hosts to choose from and it is worth shopping around. Do you want to upgrade to a paid site in the future? You will get your own domain name and email accounts for the site and many other benefits, so it is worth looking at just what benefits you will get when you sign up and how much it will cost you.

And it is always a joy when you get that message: You have sold a print of….