Picking a website host and builder

Dev Zone Web Development
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I hope this is the right place to post this question, looked like the right place to me.
I’m looking to start a small business, doing photography for homes, and focusing more on drone shots and 360 degree interior photos because it seems like a very dry market near me. I already have the equipment, that isn’t a big deal at all for me.

I have a headache from looking at so many website builders and all that crap though. I don’t want to dump nearly $400 for a year of hosting through squarespace, don’t want to self host because I don’t want to have to design my own website, or spend even more time looking at templates than I already have.

My dad recommended me ionos because he has that, but I saw some crap reviews of it, so I don’t know if I should trust it.
I found Hostinger which seems like a good choice, relatively cheap, costing about $100 a year for the plan I’m looking at.

Which leads me to this. Does anyone have any recommendations? Any trees I should go bark up, or any horror stories I should know?
Thank you guys in advance for any help, I always appreciate it! :slight_smile:

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Staying away from IONOS would be a good idea, I used to work for them in billing when they were 1&1.

Wherever you choose, I recommend keeping your domain separate with a different provider/registrar. Avoid bundling it with the package, even if it’s “free”.

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Have you tried Vercel or Netlify?
They have fast CDN hosting (Netlify is free for commercial use!)

As for getting the website made, I’m sure there are many React/Next.js templates out there with one click deploy. You’ll have to point them to your storage bucket before you go live.

After that, you can keep uploading to your storage (Cloudinary, for example) and they will appear on your site.

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so, basically you want a simple and easy website for your photography business that looks good without designing it yourself. These are some app for making and hosting website:

  • Squarespace, Wix and IONOS- It will help you in building a website easily by using templates.
  • Hostinger and SiteGround: This is basically for web hosting service. You can use them with WordPress to make your website.
    At the end i would recommend start with Hostinger WordPress Plan.
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Just noticed this is an older thread. Still, leaving this for anyone else’s that might view this even though the OP has probably already made their choice.

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Of the three “popular” services I have experience with:

Square - Avoid. You can only use them as the payment processor for your website. They can and will dump you as a customer without warning or reason given, even if you haven’t violated their ToS (or if you have they won’t tell you what you did so you’ll never know).

Once you can’t process payments their website service becomes basically useless as an e-commerce platform.

(Yes, I’ve experienced this. I also know plenty of business owners that haven’t had any issues with Square. The single point of failure is not worth it imo)

Squarespace - Nice templates, easy enough to use. They offer a couple of payment processor integrations, but not very many (3 I think). My Father in law uses them for a basic website and his main complaint is they cost a bit more than he’d prefer but it’s easy and saves him a lot of time.

I have no experience with the payment integrations.

Shopify - Likely overkill for you and probably the most expensive option. Works well if you’re doing online retail, but it’s more complicated to set up and I wouldn’t recommend for a photography business.

That said they integrate with around 100 payment processors, so they’re much more flexible than the other two.

This, this, and more this. Whatever host service you choose, get your domain through a separate registrar and strongly consider configuring DNS through yet a different provider.

It may sound paranoid, but while bundling all of this through a single provider, like squarespace, is convenient, it adds risk.

  1. If your vendor decides to lock your account, cancel your service, etc., they just locked you out of everything.

  2. If your account gets compromised and all of this is handled by a single company, now the bad actor has control of everything.

If you keep things separate, and your host goes out of business, you just need to migrate to a new service, update your DNS records, and you’re back up and running.

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