What can you do with your own family web site?
Anything you want! Family web hosting from RelatedFamilies.com gives you complete control over what you put on your family web site. If you want to build a custom web site out of PHP, HTML or even Flash, you can. However, most people use our tools to build their web site. Read on to learn about some of the tools that we offer (most are free) that you can use to build your own family web site.
Not sure where to get started with web hosting? Check out this Web Hosting guide.
Family Web Hosting Concepts
What do you look for in a family web hosting company?
The following sections will highlight a few of the important things you should look for when choosing a family web hosting company.
Price
Price is one of the first things to consider when choosing a family web hosting company to host your web site. Pay too little and chances are, you won't get very good customer service (read more on that below), but you don't want to pay too much either - don't assume that the most expensive family web hosting provider is the best. So what's the right price? For a family web site, you should look to pay between $6 to $25 per month, depending on the features you're looking for.
Customer Service
Customer service is something many people often overlook until it's too late. No matter how good a family web hosting company is, chances are, you'll need to contact customer service on occasion. You should always choose a family web hosting company that can provide you with good reliable support. In fact, you should even test them before you sign up. Why not contact us and see how responsive we are?
Features
Some family web hosting companies limit the tools you can use. Be sure to find a web hosting company that us full-featured. For example, even if you don't know how to program in PHP or if you don't plan to use anything on your web site that requires it, you should still find a hosting provider that supports it - who knows when you'll want to use a tool on your web site that supports PHP. Though there's no need to get overwhelmed if you don't know what some of these tools are - sometimes your web site will require these tools without you even knowing what they are, you should at least make sure they're support in case you need them in the future. The most common ones are PHP and MySQL.
Control Panel
A good control panel is a must! A control panel is the place where you'll go to manage your web site. You want a control panel that gives you the ability to control all aspects of your web site. RelatedFamilies uses cPanel because it gives you as the user complete control over what you do on your web site.
Money Back Guarantee
A great way to tell if a family web hosting company is reputable or not is if they offer a money back guarantee. If they don't, that might tell you something about their service. At RelatedFamilies.com, we offer a full money back guarantee. We're confident that you'll love your site, but if for some reason you do want to leave, we'll give you a refund.
Family Web Hosting Tools
What tools can you use to build a web site?
That all depends on what you want you want. We offer a flexible approach, so you can pick and choose which components you want on your family web site. The next few sections will highlight a few of these tools to help you decide which one(s) you want to use. And remember, all of these come free with your family web hosting account except for one which we'll tell you more about below.
Remember, all of the applications below can be installed to your web site using our easy to use application installer - no technical knowledge is required.
Site Builders
If you're looking for simple and easy, use one of our site builders. We offer two - rvSiteBuilder and SoHoLaunch. Both come with a bunch of great looking templates and walk you through a wizard that will tell you exactly what you need to do to build a great looking web site in a matter of minutes. If you want to get online, but you're not quite sure where to start, these pick one of these site builders and you'll be up and running in no time.
Blogging
A blog makes for a great family web site! Of course, you could always go and get a free blog somewhere, but if you do, you need to be aware of the limitations of free blogging platforms - you won't have as many templates to choose from, some blogging features will probably be limited, and some won't even let you have your own domain name. Worst of all, if you want to install another component to your web site - say an image gallery, you're out of luck. With our family web hosting plans, you won't face any of these restrictions. We also offer multiple blogging tools WordPress and b2evolution to name a few.
Content Management Systems
If you want ultimate flexibility and customizability for your family web site, choose from one of our many popular content management systems. A content management system allows you to make changes to your web site in real-time. Most come with freely available 3rd party modules that allow you to extend your web site to do really neat things, like put up a contact form, show an image gallery, or even add a shopping cart. In fact, most of the tools in this list can be integrated into a content management system. If you're willing to invest the time to learn one of these systems, you won't regret it. A few of the content management systems that are freely available with RelatedFamilies are Joomla, Drupal, Xoops, Zikula, Pivot, PHPNuke, ocPortal, Moodle, and Mambo.
The Next Generation - Online Family Tree Builder ($ - Costs Extra)
Are you in to Genealogy and you want to have an online family tree? You've come to the right place. RelatedFamilies.com specializes in hosting genealogy web sites. With The Next Generation, you can upload your Gedcom file and it will instantly build you a great looking web site. But what's more, you can actually use your web site to collaborate with others in real-time. Don't worry, you can control who has access to what, so your data will be safe. You can upload media, manage sources, add notes and much more. The Next Generation is a very powerful tool, built for both the amateur and experienced genealogist. This is one of the only software products that we offer that does cost extra, but it's very reasonably priced - only $29.95 one-time. If you would like a free trial of this software, Send us an email.
PhpGedView - Open Source PHP Online Family Tree Builder
Much like The Next Generation, PhpGedView lets you build an online family tree web site by upload a Gedcom file (if you have one) or from scratch. A lot of family web hosting companies can support this software, but we'll install it for you for free so you don't need to be a computer geek (or hire one) to get it up and running. PhpGedView is a little less user-friendly than The Next Generation is, but it comes with very powerful features and those who use it absolutely love it!
Photo Gallery
What's a photo gallery? Simple, it's a component that you can add to your web site that allows you to upload and manage your photos in a private (or not so private) environment. We give you plenty of disk space so you'll be able to store a bunch of photos to share with the rest of the family.
Wiki
A wiki is a great place to collaborate. If you want to allow multiple people to contribute to your web site, you want a wiki. It's a great resource for collecting and organizing information. If you've ever heard of Wikipedia, you know what a wiki is. We offer a few different wiki's for you to choose from depending on the features you're looking for.
Conclusion
Hopefully that information was helpful to you in your quest to find the perfect family web hosting provider and in understanding some of the tools that are readily available to help you quickly and easily build your own family web site. If you have any other questions about choosing a family web hosting company, please don't hesitate to Ask Us.