Got any good reliable/affordable web hosting leads?

How bout websites...do you guys use custom designed sites or some sort of blog platform like comicpress? Would love to know whats out there as i'm in those early stages of getting my comic online.

Hey Chris. As you know I use Wordpress/Comicpress which is really all I need it to be. In my experience, having the blog feature set up as part of your webcomic is very important. There was some talk about Comicpress stating to charge for the template but apparently that is not true. Comicpress 3.0 should be coming out soon and from what I hear it's pretty easy to use and set up compared to what it is now.

Unless you are a guru web designer I don't think it would be worth it to try to replicate what is freely available with wordpress and comicpress together.

As far as Hosts, I love bluehost.com the most out of all the hosts I've use before.

I have my own website, but if I was starting out now I would use Comicpress as Jason recommends. It seems to have everything one could need and it's super customizable.

I'm using my own webspace, too. My website is coded by hand, which gives me a lot of creative control over the different pages without having to dive into complex content management solutions. That would not be worth the effort because my website is a rather static showcase with long lasting content. My activities currently concentrate on my blog which is a regular blogspot thing. I plan to open up a Facebook fanpage for the Wormworld Saga as soon as the first chapter is published. The interaction with people and the community building in general for the project is planned to take place over there.

I use FatCow and Wordpress for both my personal site and the IM&L site. Never had a problem! Wordpress is pretty incredible in how you can customize it.

Well, breaking news on the comicpress front--3.0 is not happening, or else it will happen but without one of its major developers. What IS happening, however, is even better. They're making a wordpress plugin, Comic Easel, that is going to be compatible with any wordpress theme you want to use. It'll also have seperate plug-ins for galleries, podcasts, etc. The whole thing is up at frumph.net, and it is looking incredible! Due for a December release, too, at least at this point.

And if you can't tell, I'm joining the "use wordpress" crowd. It's a lot easier than spending time learning to php your own back end--trust me, I tried--and hard-coded website updates are tedious and time consuming to update for comic purposes (though as Daniel says, they're fine if it's just a static showcase). As far as hosts go, though, I recommend Dreamhost. I've been with them about two years now and haven't had a single issue as of yet.

I use Comicpress for my comic, and use HostGator for my hosting.

I'll support the many who have mentioned the benefits of ComicPress on WordPress. I was sorry to hear that it will be apparently not continuing in development, but it will be interesting to see what happens with the Comic Easel project.

I'm not a developer (software engineer) but have gained enough skill with PHP to handle a bit of modification from time to time. For people at my skill level, it is hard to beat WP.

Does anyone use Webcomic (I think it's v3.0 by now)? I think it's a pretty decent platform to use off of Wordpress. You have to do a little bit of work to make a good layout, but that doesn't take a whole lot of it or knowledge of CSS/HTML coding. What I'm using for my theme now is pretty much from everything I figured out before even starting class on that stuff.

Do any of the major comic publishing frameworks support automated thumbnail creation of your GN pages? As a reader I've found that feature lacking on many of the sites I read. Picking on 'The Bean' (I pick on Travis a lot which indicates I spend a lot of time looking at his works.. so it's really a compliment), the other day I wanted to go back and refresh my memory about something Siv said. There was no way I was going to repeatedly click previous to find the page I wanted to view (it was many, many posts ago). Instead I just manually tweaked the page numbers in the url until I found some pages that were near and then starting clicking previous until I found it. Yuk.*

Cedar gets +100 (which, in addition to her blue ribbon should put her in the lead... although I don't think NikiSmith or Adielle have had their points awarded yet) for having page slices (stylish thumbnails) to help people navigate her GN content quickly!!

*Maybe Travis' response would be, if you don't like the site... just buy the hard copy!


EDIT: I should have known better than to try to pick on Travis a.k.a "Mr. Impeccable". His site contains thumbnails for easily navigating the GN pages. I was just too dense to find them. Maybe I was thrown off because they are archived by month vs. by chapter or volume or whatever. I hope I have not offended by my ignorant and wholly false claim !!

ComicPress does, at least version 2.9 does. It's a choice on your archive page set up--you can list as thumbnails or as text, and the thumbnails auto-set at a size you specify OR at their auto set size... which I can't remember the dimensions of off hand.

Hmmm... archive page. That sounds like a good place for thumbs. Maybe the comics I've been reading are using thumbnails and I just didn't poke around the site long enough (or smartly enough) to find them.

ComicPress 2.9 archive page with thumbnails? I really need to get up to date. That sounds great!

I swear by ComicPress and Laughing Squid Web Hosting. Laughing Squid is low impact and low hassle, which I have valued enormously.

--M

Hee, thanks for validating that! Just saw this post, I was unexpectedly away a few days

Does anybody else also host with ixwebhosing.com? I have just recently changed to them and so far they seem alright, no down time, no hassle, fairly even priced packages. I would be up for other reviews if anybody hosts with others.

I've been using 1and1.com - never had a problem, but then again, I have yet to send much traffic there.

That's a sophisticated bit of spam right there... NUKE IT!

Spam removed!

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