Family Web Site Guide

Why We Should Create a Family Web Site

A family Website is a great way to share what is going on with other family members and friends, especially those who live far away. On the family web site, we share a lot of fun thing about family on it, for example:

• Introduction of family member
• Excited event in family, such as: birthday party, new baby birth, wedding, a travel, etc.
• The growth of the kid or just a few pictures we take during a walk. Your kid will enjoy going back seeing what you did a few years ago.
• Post funny jokes that we read or comment on what is going on in the world
• Just think about all the other possibilities.

So making a family web site will be a fun family project. And it really isn't hard to create it and it doesn't cost too much as well!

Choose a Name for Your Family Web Site

First, you will need to think about a domain for your family site, choose something that will make sense to you and your family. For more about what's domain, and how to find a best name for your family site, please refer to Select the Best Domain Name

What kinds of Web Hosting You Need for a Family Web Site

1. Basic Requirement of Web Hosting Plan for a Family Site

Basic requirement will discuss about the general feature of Family Web Hosting, such as disk space, band width, reliability, etc. Those are the basic feature you need to think about when you want to hosting a web site.

• For a family web site, a shared Linux Server web hosting plan is the best choice unless you really want to use ASP or .Net to build you site, spending more time and more money.
• About reliability, since most of the web hosting company can provide 99.5% uptime, and considering it's not a business site, this uptime percentage is good enough for a family site. No need to spend more.
• Disk space will heavily depend on what you want to put online, only picture, or together with Video, since video become more and more common, and you might want to share the family video with your friends. So let's do a simple calculation, one picture will 250k, and 5 minutes video will take 50M. So, if you put 2000 picture and 100 video on your family site, picture will take you 0.5g disk space, and video will need 5g, overall, you will need a space around 5.5g. About Band Width, if you plan to put a lot of picture and video online, a 10g band width is expected, if only picture, a 500M -1G should be ok.
• For Email account, unless you have a very very big family, otherwise 1 - 10 Email account should be ok, and you also can use some free email account from Yahoo, Gmail, etc.
• Since Family site is also shared in the friends or family group, you definitely has no need to have a Shopping Cart of SSL to do the business, and you also don't need a Web Market Tools to attract a lot of traffic to your web site.
• What about the server location? For this question, I would like to suggest you to host your site domestic company considering most of the visitor in your country, it would be faster to access your site.
• You have no need to spend a lot to get a domain name, it's usually take around $6.5, you can find some company provide this service at Domain Registration, but if it can be included in a web hosting plan, it's not bad. And you can order Domain and Web Hosting plan from different company, and have the Web hosting company to help you host the domain in their server. You only need to submit a case, and they will handle it for you.

2. Advanced requirement of Web Hosting Plan for a Family Site

The advanced requirement will discuss about what additional help you need to get from web hosting company if you have some specific requirement. And the solution for it will depend on how skilled you are,

• Blog

Do you want to have a Blog in your family web site, if yes. And you know some basic PC knowledge, you will only need to you will need a web hosting plan can host MySQL database and provide Fantastico in its cPanel, you can install the blog by yourself via Fantastico (it's pretty easy, just click through some installation process). But if you have no IT knowledge and don't want to spend some time to learn, you will need to have Blog preinstalled by web hosting company. Another good solution for it would be you can write the Blog in some other space, such as Blogger, and add a link in your web site which will lead the visitor to your blog.

• Photo Galleries

If you don't know how to arrange the picture in the web site, you will need a Photo Galleries to help you manage the picture. But if you know about HTML, this will be something optional, you can spend some time to build a one you like most. After all, create a family site is a fun project, and DIY is part of it.

• Web Design Tools

If you have basic knowledge about HTML, and know how to use the tool like Frontpage, you will no need to have Web Design tools in your web hosting plan, otherwise, it would be good to have some basic web design tools included.

3. Price

No great comment for this one, just pay what you want and get what you have paid.

Affordable Reliable Web Hosting Plan for Family Web Site

There are a lot of Web Hosting Plan can host your family site, many people might want to order a plan which can host more than one domain and then they host their home small business site and family site together under different domain. This would be choice, but I would like to suggest to host them separately and the thought here is to separate your business and private usage. Don't let your family site impact your business, your kid might upload a lot of picture and use up your bandwidth and make your business unavailable.

Now, go to Family Web Site Hosting to see what's the best Family Web Hosting Plan.