An Experimental Life

I combined two pages here, so some information is repeated. I'll fix it at some point.

At this point you should have your first few strips done and are probably wondering what's next.

Obviously, you're going to need web hosting and depending on your host choice, probably a domain name of your own. You can go a couple of different ways with this. You can pay for hosting or go with a free web host. Each has it's advantages, but paid web hosting wins out over the long haul for several reasons.

General advice for finding a good host:
Remember the advantages of paid hosting as opposed to free hosting. To name just two; you get your own domain (some advertisers won't touch you without your own domain, and face it--It just looks more professional.), you get to choose whether or not to have ads on your site, and since you're paying for hosting, you can expect better tech support and customer service. We've been through a slew of hosts looking for reliability and good customer service and tech support, so learn from our mistakes. I even heavily endorsed a few, much to my later embarrassment. I simply had not done enough research.

It may take some time, but I encourage you to check out several web hosts and compare them before you decide. I've got some recommendations and reviews listed below to get you started. Remember that bandwidth and disk space are not everything. All the disk space and bandwidth in the world does you no good if their service is not reliable. Go to WebHostingTalk.Com and read what others have to say about various hosts, too. Many hosts have representatives who hang out on the boards, so in addition to getting users' views, you can often hear what the host has to say. One caveat: There are some hosting providers who have been known to have their employees pretend to be customers and post rave reviews of their services. These should be easy to spot, though--If most reviews are bad, but there is a block of reviews praising that particular host that use much the same language patterns or in broken English, those rave reviews are probably fake. Pay more attention to what long-time trusted members of the site that other users seem to respect have to say than on people with only two or three posts on the boards.

One of the things I look for is a host that offers you an easy interface through which to administer your site, unless you happen to be very tech-savvy. So far I've tried Plesk, CPanel, and a couple of proprietary administration interfaces, and it is my opinion that CPanel tops them all. You can try out a demo of CPanel here.

If you plan to run multiple domains on one account, you might also want to look for a provider who gives you WHM (Web Host Manager), which you can demo here.

Many hosts offer everything for next to nothing. They do this by a practice called overselling. What this means is that they TELL you that you have tons of storage space and bandwidth (some even claim to offer unlimited bandwidth) for an incredibly low price. What they actually do is put as many accounts as they possibly can onto each server (One host, we discovered, was running 800 or more accounts and thousands of sites on a single machine, that turned out to be a regular desktop model, at that!), figuring that most people will use only a fraction of their allocation. At that type of host, if you come anywhere close to using what they told you that you had, things start breaking down. So, if a host is offering tons of disk space and bandwidth for an almost unbelievably low price, it is a safe bet that they are severely overselling. Avoid.

It is better to pay a little more for reliability than to cut corners and embarrass yourself with frequent site outages (as I've learned the hard way). I'm not going to trash-talk anyone here, but if you send a contact email asking, I can tell you with whom we've had bad experiences. Many of them started out great, only to fail when our bandwidth and processor demands rose.

Another practice many of the budget hosts use is to outsource their tech support to companies who run call centers staffed with people who know little or nothing about computers or the internet, and who all too often are not fluent enough in English (or the dominant language of wherever they're doing business) to understand customer questions, much less answer them. They just listen for buzzwords and read from pre-written scripts.

Now, I have nothing against any nationality, ethnic group, or creed, but a host needs to have reps who actually speak and understand the dominant language of whatever countries in which they do significant business. If a lot of their business comes from Germany or Austria, those reps had better speak German. in Canada, the British Isles, or the USA, they need to speak English, with perhaps some Spanish and French-speaking reps. It's just good business. How in the world are you going to explain your problem and get good support over the telephone with someone who doesn't understand your language?

Before deciding on a host, I suggest that you check what kind of tech support they offer, what hours they offer it, and how they provide it. I prefer 24/7 phone support myself. If they offer 24/7 phone support, call at 4am before you buy and ask every technical question you can think of. If no one answers, or if you get someone who doesn't know the difference between FTP and PHP (this actually happened to me), or who doesn't speak your language well enough to actually communicate, cross them off your list and move on to the next one.

Also, most shared hosting providers do not operate their own datacenters, but pay another hosting company to use theirs. This is not necessarily a dealbreaker, but I have generally gotten better results from those who have their own datacenters and use multiple "fat pipes" (T1 lines, T3 lines, etcetera) from different providers in case one or more go down.

Most webcomic scripts require either Perl or PHP support, and many require that you have acces to a mySQl database, so ask about those things.

And oh, yeah--although GoDaddy did not meet our hosting needs (They put so many restrictions on your access to server processes that I was unable to find a single webcomic update script that worked with them.), I encourage you to use them as your domain registrar. No, I don't have an endorsement deal with them; I've just had good experiences with them as a registrar. It is generally a good practice to keep your domain registrar and your web hosting completely separate in case things turn ugly. (We had one host that refused to release our domains to us--until I filed a complaint with ICANN.) It is also worth the few extra bucks a year to add privacy to your registration, since some spammers collect email addresses from "WhoIs" lookups.

Web host considerations
You're going to want a few things from your web host. Some sort of "up-time" guarantee, a good amount of bandwidth (at least 10 gigs per month to begin with, with an option to get bigger. BCK uses about 30 gigs/month right now.), and I'd say at least half a gig of disk space.

A few hosts specialize in webcomics, and have their own system set up for you already. The up side of this is a quick learning curve. The downside is that you have to do things their way.

If you go with your own hosting, like we do, you will need a host that supports PHP and possibly MySQL (or some other kind of database) access if you want to use any of the more common comic update scripts instead of coding every link by hand. You can download our customized version of Walrus if you like, which does not require a database. In fact, I recommend using a script that does not require a database if possible. Or if you don't mind doing a little more work, you can talk to me about using Drupal for your webcomic site. It takes a little customization to use Drupal, but once it is set up, it's easy. I can tell you how I'm setting that up if you want, and will probably post something here about how I did it once I am completely finished. If you end up getting hosting through us (see the next page), I can set up either Walrus or Drupal for you.

A CPanel interface (don't worry about what it is yet--just know that it is good, especially if you're new to all this) is also a big plus. Yes, I can use an FTP client just fine, thank you, but CPanel is a much more pleasant user experience, and so easy to use that the most clueless amature can figure it out in no time.

One other thing you will want is good tech support.

Do your research!
I can't stress this enough. Do Google searches for reviews of each web host you consider. Post to forums. Do searches like "hosted by *whatever host you're considering*," and, "*whatever host you're considering* review." Especially look at the WebHostingTalk Forums. Don't even bother with the "top web host" sites, as hosts (I found to my dismay) can purchase a listing on most of those.

People often ask who we use. To be honest, I finally got fed up with doing the webhost shuffle, and we have now become our own webhost (Lawrencehost), but server is at LiquidWeb's data center, and I highly recommend them. There are one or two advantages of hosting with us (we can set up your webcomic scripting for you at no additional charge), but overall, I'd go with LiquidWeb, as, obviously, I did.

The main reason we're selling hosting at all is to defray our own operating expenses and provide a refuge for webcomicers and friends who need hosting. We'd be happy to sell you hosting if you like, and even set up your webcomic update script for you (and if your site goes down, you know I'll be on top of it because that would mean BCK is down, too!), but I'm not going to try to hard-sell you. We don't WANT to host too many people, at least at this point, because I want to keep the quality up. This being so, I'm equally pleased if you shop around and find another host you're happy with. I've a list of a few with good reputations on the following page.

Paid hosting

The three tiers of paid hosting
The three "tiers" of paid hosting are as follows: Shared, VPS, and Dedicated Server.

Shared hosting is the most common, and is probably fine to get you started. With shared hosting, a bunch (often hundreds) of customers have sites on a single server. The only time this really causes problems is when another customer does something stupid and uses too many system resources, it can drag down your site's performance.

VPS--As you grow, if you start experiencing slowdowns, you may want to move to a VPS (virtual private server). On a VPS, the hard drive( is partitioned, with one partition per customer and an instance of the web serving, database, etcetera software running on each partition. You are guaranteed a minimum amount of allocated RAM.

Dedicated Servers are the top end of what you'll deal with, and you'll only need one of these if your strip gets wildly popular along the lines of Sluggy Freelance--and maybe not even then.

General web host considerations
I did a lot of research before I picked a web host for us. I looked for features, bandwidth and diskspace value, good reports from current users, and good customer service. (For a list of a whole bunch of web hosts, including the ones we use, check the next page.) I've also picked a few real losers before by not doing enough research.

You probably don't want to host on GoDaddy. While GoDaddy is good for REGISTERING your domains, I wouldn't host a webcomic on them. I know they're cheap, but they are also very webcomic-unfriendly (some webcomic update scripts simply will not run on their basic package), and their technical support is abysmal. The one time I spoke to tech support at GoDaddy, the guy could not seem to comprehend even the simplest questions. He, in fact, could not get it through his head that I was trying to get a script to update a path name and kept telling me, "Well it looks like your path name is wrong so you'll have to correct it." No kidding, it's wrong, Sherlock--that's why I called. I gave up and switched hosts--fortunately this was before our projected launch date for BCK. They don't even allow RSS feeds from their low-end accounts, for crying out loud!

Free or paid?
There is only one thing in favor of hosting your comic on most free services--they're free. Most of them also will not allow you to place advertisements on your site, and I know of none that will let you have your own domain name. They're fine for personal vanity sites, but not much beyond that. Many ad services won't let you run their ads unless you have your own domain.

Note that I said most free services. There are a few free web hosts out there who cater specifically to webcomics. Drunk Duck, SmackJeeves, and Comic Genesis (formerly Keenspace) both offer free hosting for comics, but while they do their best to provide good service, some require you to run their ads, so there goes one source of revenue if you plan on monetizing your site. You also don't get your own domain name on them, unless I am mistaken.

These may not seem like big deals at first, but if you eventually want to run your own ads or have your own domain name (face it--what looks more professional, having "mycomicname.com," or, "otherwebservice.com/mycomic," as your url?) it could be a pain. Also, (and I'll mention this again later), many advertising networks will not even consider you unless you have your own domain.

Now if you don't mind another entity having control of your ad space and you don't care about having your own domain name, by all means use one of these services! They are, after all, free. We were going to use Keenspace (now Comic Genesis) for BCK, but in addition to the above mentioned problems, they've had occasional problems with signup, posting, and server outages. Every host has had some problems of this sort, but when you're paying for a service you've got a little more right to gripe when things don't work. Drunk Duck has had problems with their DNS servers lately, and there is no link on their front page (as of this writing) to find out what they offer or what their conditions are without actually signing up for an account first.

In general, I'm not big on free hosting. Sometimes free is all you can afford, though.

Getting your domain
Most hosts can help you with domain registration, but we just register our domains with GoDaddy because it's a good idea to keep domain registration and hosting seperate (again, more details on the next page). The name you want may be taken, so have a few backup URLs you wouldn't mind using. Once you find a name you like that isn't taken, buy that sucker, follow the directions to get it pointed to your host's servers, and give it up to 24 hours to propogate through the DNS system. (It can take from four to twenty-four hours for a domain to show up. You can start putting stuff there right away, but people won't actually be able to check your URL until it propogates.)