Realize your potential

For a while now Dalton Technology has offered low cost hosting via the http://noworriesweb.com site. Sadly we have have decided to stop providing this service. Margins are much reduced and the support is just too much for us.

Rather than leave you in the lurch we have decided to provide you with this low cost "recipe" that we use for some of our own sites. You can get a lot of things for free or next to nothing these days if you know where to go (part of the reason we are getting out of this business).

This advice is free - but don't hold us to it, this works for us, but may not suit everyone. If this advice is useful to you, feel free to register your domain with us at http://domains.noworriesweb.com in return.

DOMAIN REGISTRATION:

Domain Registration is when you purchase your domain, eg. http://foocycle.com from a Domain registry vendor or reseller. You are free to use whoever you like, but we are resellers of planet domain so feel free to register with us asy http://domains.noworriesweb.com if you like. If you are going to use everydns for DNS you'll need to add the following as your name servers

ns1.everydns.net
ns2.everydns.net
ns3.everydns.net
ns4.everydns.net

DNS HOSTING:

Next you will need somebody to host your DNS entries for you. This is the "pointer record" that tells everyone else on the internet where to find the various services associated with your domain.

You can get a free account with http://everydns.net - point all the mail records to google mail (see below) and your web record to your web host's IP address. Everydns is free - but we suggest you give a small donation if you find the service useful - donors get a few extra nice features.

MAIL (and basic web):

Hosting mail on our web servers was becoming an increasing problem for us. Spam levels were astromical, and anti-spam software wasn't always that nice with our CPUs

Google has a new service called Google Apps that allows you to host gmail style accounts on your own domain. You don't have to use the gmail web interface either, you can enable POP and just collect email like any other server. Lots of other features too that we won't go into here. We use this for all our email these days - Google do an excellent job of spam blocking as they have a large amount of mail to use as a reference to determine what is spam or not.

Google apps also allow basic web hosting, and a high level site builder - which may suit your needs. Although it is pretty basic.

You'll need to use the following page to help you configure your MX records in everydns.

HOSTING:

We use http://vpslink.com for all our hosting now. They are a Virtual Host (read their excellent website for an explaination of this). Their basic server is just $6.50 a month - and you have your own dedicated virtual host. You need a bit of know how with Linux to be able to set it up - if you are not comfortable with it - you may be able get someone to run it for you. We might provide a howto here if we get the time.

We use the OpenVZ plans, the basic plan is quite adequate for basic sites without a database - even with apache (tuned), however we would recommend lighttpd if you want to get the most out of your server.