School website hosting - is this ok?

[SteveB_NI]

I've been asked to produce a website for a local school, which unfortunately does not have facilities for web hosting at present.

Can anyone cast their eye over this idea please before I commit the school to buying it (I have not purchased hosting for many years and would hate to choose the wrong one and waste their already limited budget).

Hosting: http://www.dream-hosting.co.uk/gold.php

Gold Hosting Plan – Dream Hosting - £19.99 / yr
1. 1GB disk space
2. 25GB Bandwidth / Month
3. 7 MySQL databases (PHPMyAdmin)
4. Add on domain name allowance
5. Unlimited email account (@yourdomain.co.uk)
6. Web based website control panel
7. Unlimited sub domains
8. PHP & Perl support

Domain name:

£7.49 (2 Yr Min) (.co.uk address) or (.com)

The website is going to be coded initially in static HTML with CSS styling, although it will progress to a full Content management system designed via PHP and MySQL in a short time.

I'm concerned about the 25GB bandwidth / month - maybe doubling that to 50GB / month would be better (hosting package costs £39.99/yr).

Thanks for any help,

Steven

[plexer]

What about bluehost.com?

We use web-mania.com for our school site.

Ben

[SteveB_NI]

Sorry forgot to mention, it is intended the school website will be used primarily for the school newsletter, and gallery photographs of events - this could mean quite a few visits at particular times of the year.

Looking into web-mania now - do you not find the 12GB / month somewhat restrictive?

[plexer]

In the last 31 days on the school website which is based on the edugeek joomla template we have transferred the following:

673mb
99455 files
18589 pages
2211 unique hits.

Ben

[contink]

Having hosted a very photo intensive site in the past you're probably going to be fine with your original spec but you'll want to take a few precautionary measures as you design/impliment the site.

1. Make sure any photos are resized (preferably automatically) to a max dimension of 800 pixels in any direction and JPG or PNG compressed.

2. Screen any uploads, especially DOC's for massive images that haven't been resized externally (10mb newsletters have been a common issue at one school I work for).

3. Where possible try to use CSS rather than images and keep the code lean..

Beyond that, you should be fine..

[greenfieldsupport]

Do schools not host their own websites these days??

whats stopping you hosting it yourself?

[SteveB_NI]

I work for a different school - it's a partnership scheme with a local primary school. They don't have access to web hosting like we do at the Secondary level.

I'd rather they hosted it themselves - it's easier in the long term if circumstances change.

[dan400007]

I maybe (well probably am) wrong but I thought the all RBC were went to provide web hosting facilities to and domain name to their schools.

[FN-GM]

name.com are pretty cheap

z

[Pumaedition]

streamline.net are quite good as well I have found

[plexer]

There have been various discussions in the past on school web hosting including one that I started.

We signed up for streamline and then cancelled it due to their inflexibility.

Ben

[greenfieldsupport]

SteveB, be nice and host it for them, firstly A. it will cost them less and B. you would have more control.

I think heart internet do domain names for ~ £2 now ??

Just give them some old 133mhz pc in the corner with Debian on, and forward their domain name to it

[greenfieldsupport]

although £19.99 a year, damn thats a good deal on hosting!

you sure thats not a month seems as it includes mysql and such??

[j17sparky]

There have been various discussions in the past on school web hosting including one that I started.

We signed up for streamline and then cancelled it due to their inflexibility.

Ben

Why were they inflexible? Im asking as i was considering Streamline

[localzuk]

They don't allow you to change DNS records. Also, they are very inflexible if your site uses anything like mysql and they determine you as 'over using it' whereby the just cancel your account without any warning...