I’m looking for a little advice here from some of you experts!
We have been using Netim for the past few years for our Association emails and associated website. They have recently stopped hosting websites although have continued with emails.
We have thought about hosting the site ourselves but we need to be able to pass it on to someone else in due course.
So… what we’re after is a French hosting environment that we can put the simplest static site possible on. We only need HTML - not PHP or website builders or even Wordpress.
I have no experience of French hosting companies (though I did use 1and1 aka IONOS for a while who are German and surprisingly rubbish).
I currently use Krystal in the UK who I can heartily recommend, but for simplicity’s sake you probably need a French provider.
One thing I would say is don’t let them sell you tons of add-ons you don’t need - for a static website that’s not going to get a massive amount of traffic the most basic package available should be fine.
However, do check to see if regular site backups are included in the deal, ideally daily but weekly should be OK if you don’t change it very often. Some of the much-advertised hosting firms charge an additional fee for this which is b*llocks.
OVH, Hostinger and EX2 all have data centres here in France… Just make sure to do a backup yourself if using OVH as a few years back they suffered a large outage, and it was only then that many customers realised they’d got no backup plans in place.
If you’re just using something like WordPress then all of the above will have packages for about 30€ per year, possibly throwing in a free domain name too.
Maybe sign up for a free trial to see how you get on with their panel for doing admin stuff… Some are user-friendlier than others.
One more tip - whoever you sign up with for your hosting, use a generic email address for the signup and administrator contact - e.g. a GMail or Apple Mail address - NOT an email address associated with the site domain name, and NOT the email address your internet service provider gives you.
This is because you need to be able to receive notifications if the site goes down, and if your admin email is on the server where your domain is hosted then you will be scuppered!
The same applies for the registration of your web domain - use a separate generic email address for the administration of that.
Many years ago, in the dim distant days of dial-up internet, I had an email account with Pipex. I used this email address to register a couple of domain names. Some years later, I changed my internet service provider so my Pipex email address went dead.
When I later wanted to renew the domain names, I was unable to do so because the admin emails were all being sent to the defunct Pipex email address - so I lost the domains. Nor could I change the admin email on the domain registration admin site to my new one, because a confirmation from the old email address was required for security reasons.
Had I used an Apple Mail address (for example) all would have been fine.
This is especially important with a domain for a club or association as it’s likely that the person looking after it will change fairly regularly, so you need to be able to hand over admin duties easily.
So before you sign up for your new hosting, set up an email address of “notre-club@icloud-dot-com” (or whatever) and use that for all the admin, and also change your domain registration contact email to that one as well.
Thank you very much for your suggestions everyone! I really appreciate them.
We also had (and still have to some extent) dreadful experience of IONOS in the days when we had a thriving business (now long gone…).
We don’t need the supplier to give us anything other than HTML and email. It will be a static site, simply there in order to give people information about our Association and point them to an email address and probably Facebook page (shudder).
The days of fancy sites for customers needing bells and whistles are, mercifully, in the past. We have a copy of everything locally on our own servers and Netim was just right, but no longer.
I shall have a look at all you’ve mentioned once I’ve finished my belated breakfast!
It doesn’t sound like this would apply to you, but absolutely avoid “all in one” web hosting with site builder options, like Wix or SquareSpace.
Why?
They seem like a nice easy option, but their website builders are proprietary - if you fall out with them or they put their prices up unreasonably, or (heaven forbid) they go bust - the website is not “portable” - you can’t just download a copy and host it elsewhere, you have to start from scratch, which is inconvenient to say the least.
They also tend to be quite pricey compared to “plain vanilla” hosting.
Back when I used to help other photographers with their websites, there were quite a few folks who got bitten by this - they signed up for a shiny new website service “designed especially for photographers” “easy to maintain”, “fast-loading photo galleries” etc. etc.
Then they found that tech support was abysmal and / or the service went dead without notice, and they could not move the website elsewhere because of its proprietary coding (and often there was no option to make an off-site backup in any case).
This is one reason WordPress is so popular for site construction incidentally, because almost all web hosts offer WordPress hosting and thus it is generally fairly easy to move a website from Hosting Company A to Hosting Company B - some will even do it for you for free when you sign up.
But see my comments above about Wix and similar platforms.
Might be fine, but if you ever want or need to leave Wix you will have to start again. And AFAIK you can’t upload an existing HTML-based website to their platform, you have to use their site builder.
Hostinger is a good shout. I’ve used them previously.
You can use something like Vercel or Netlify to host for free. You just need to create a Github account and upload your site files there. Then Vercel or Netlify will copy your Github repository and host it. You don’t pay for small amounts of visitors, only once it passes the multiple thousands threshold.
