3ix Web Hosting

 Web Hosting can be an expensive business, well I have found a web host that is extremely cheap and offers everything you need.

3ix Hosting offers many different packages, ranging from just 59p ($1) a month all the way to £4.72 ($8). The cheapest package is perfect for most people, it offers you 100MB of webspace and 10GB monthly bandwidth, you can have up to 20 sub domains and 20 email accounts. The control panel is based on the highly popular cPanel which is used by a lot of web hosts.

The £4.72 plan gives you 2GB of webspace, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited sub domains and email accounts and you can host up to 10 websites in the one account.

You can pay semi annually or annually (one month free) via paypal or credit/debit card. The reason why it is so cheap is because there is very little administration needed to process credit/debit cards and paypal.

Obviously, you will need a domain name, if you have one then you can just transfer it, if you don’t then you can purchase one for about £6.50 or $12.95 a year which is cheap compared to some services.

So, overall the service is good, you get all the tools you need through the cPanel although there is no place to login on the homepage which would have been a good idea. It took less than half an hour to get online, and now I can be found at www.simnorcomputing.com, and how much does it cost me for everything? Only £13 per year ($26).

WordPress

The site that you are looking at now is made and run with WordPress, hence techreviewzone.wordpress.com. WordPress offers a free website which uses blog technology to ensure that the updating of the website is quick and simple. You can add pages as well which is lacking in a lot of other blogging services, this makes WordPress blogs to work like websites. You can choose one of the great designed themes, edit what is seen on the sidebar and upload images, pdfs, doc and powerpoint presentations to your posts although there is only 50MB of space available (more can be purchased on a credit system).

There are many advanced features to wordpress which sets it apart from other similar services, you can add passwords to posts and allow other people to update the site through adding users to the dashboard.

All the usual features of a blog, such as commenting and hierarchal structuring of posts is still available. There is also a great search feature which is very advanced, it will find all posts with the words or phrases that were entered in the search box. There is also the option to add a video from services like YouTube, straight to your blog.

WordPress is one of the biggest blogging services on the net with over 66,000 sites on its servers (stats correct to date of publication), it is definitely worth a look at. I will warn you that WordPress may look hard to start with, but if you do need any help take a look at the help documentation available on the WordPress site or email me for help, I’ll be happy to assist.

Simon North, 25th January 2007