If not Sitesell.com, what else?

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My first site was with Sitesell (and still is) but my newer sites are with Wordpress.

Sitesell taught me a lot of what I know and that site still gets 800 - 900 uniques per day in the fitness niche and makes me the bulk of my online income.

Personally I recommend it for beginners.

I agree, sitesell.com is very useful for beginners. But as what mostly have heard, a lot of sites, especially the important ones, are moving to another host. They say the sites are too optimized which is also bad news for Google. Godaddy.com is a good option and is cheaper. If you have the money for it Hostgator or Bluehost.

Whether you are a beginner or an expert you should try Wordpress. Try to learn how to design your own wordpress themes and then the things will come in your control.

I think it depends on what your goals are for the site. I've been building websites since 1997 and I have more than 200 of them today hosted across nearly a dozen different hosts and platforms (including WordPress and SBI).

If you are just looking for a small (1 to 10 page) site to host your webpage on, I recommend using free hosts, either Webs, Weebly, or Wix. Know that you can not use these sites to bring in income from GoogleAdSence or any affiliates. Each of these hosts offers thousands of free templates, and the option to use your own codes if you prefer to build the site without a template. These hosts offer options to upgrade (around $4 to $15 a month depending on the package you choose) later if you decide you need more than 10 pages or want your own domain. If you are an absolute beginner who is just looking to get a site about you and/or your business online, this is the best, simplest, and easiest way to go. However if you are looking to earn income off Google Ads or affiliate links, these free hosts are NOT the way to go, as the reason they are free is because THEY place Google Ads and various affiliate links on your site and THEY keep all the money from them. Your account will be banned if you attempt to add your own affiliate inks to a free hosted site. Know too that these sites rank really low with Google so you'll not get much traffic unless you do a lot of old fashioned link exchange work. For most personal sites (shared only with friends/family) and "local brick&mortar" business sites (whose only goal for a website is to share updates with customers they already have) these sites are great because your goal isn't to get a lot of traffic from Google anyways. They are also make very good "practice sites" to let you test various template styles and looks or for teaching yourself simple html/css/java, before paying for a website elsewhere.

If you are looking for a "more advanced" site, one that allows (LIMITED) use of affiliate links (be sure to read the ToS CAREFULLY as a FEW affiliate companies are blacklisted/banned from use and your account well be deleted if you use them.) than WordPress is a better way to go. They offer free (WordPress.com) and paid (WordPress.org) options. In regards to affiliate links you have more freedom with the paid version of WordPress (only about 3 affiliate host sites are banned and they are almost unheard of so you likely would never use them anyways), however the free version of WordPress has a lot of limits on the types of links you can and can not put on your site, so be careful there. You can have a pretty big site with WordPress, mine has been online since 2003 and has 5,500+ pages. Some WordPress sites get lots of traffic (mine gets about 1,000 hits a day, which is high or low depending on who you ask, but for my site topic that's really high) while others get almost no traffic. Google doesn't seem to "punish" or "reward" you for hosting on WordPress. Google seems to judge WordPress hosted sites based on each site itself and not on the server hosting it. I have personally found that WordPress, while it gets good traffic, is not a good place for relying on residual income from GoogleAds or affiliates. WordPress.com is VERY beginner friendly, but WordPress.org is a bit more advanced, though a beginner can certainly learn is fast.

If you know how to do everything from the ground up, than you can write your own code, buy your own domain, and than host the site on a place such as HostGator (but know that these sites have page limits varying from 100 to 1000 depending on the package you buy, and some have bandwidth limits, meaning after a certain amount of users visit your site in a month, your site goes offline for the rest of the month - watch out for those things in the ToS before you pay for them). This is a fairly advanced way to go and not recommended for a beginner.

SBI is extremely beginner friendly, however, it is intended just for a very small and specific audience, so it is NOT for everyone, in fact I would not even recommend it for the general public at all, because it's heavily writing intensive, and really if you are not an English Major, a profession author, or a career editor, you really are going to have a hard time making money with it. Me, an English Major who has written 30+ books, now owns a publishing house, and types on average 15,000 words a day, personally, I love SBI and think it's wonderful, however, it's a huge amount of time and work and TYPING thousands of words a day to get a site started with SBI, and of the options I've listed here, it is by far the most expensive to do.

SBI is an infopreneur based platform that assumes you are an expert in your topic, probably even a college professor who teaches about your topic, and is so overflowing with info to share to others about your topic that you don't mind typing 500 pages of how wonderful your topic is. In order to be successful with SBI, basically you have to sit down and type up 200 to 300 pages minimum of authoritative info on a single topic. So if you love Maine History and know it inside out and have the writing skills to fill up a textbook worth of pages about it, than you could write 300 pages about Maine History, a page for every town, pages of reviews of historical places to visit in Maine, etc, etc, etc, post them to an SBI site and you'd be hugely successful. On the other hand if you are a small business, who just wants to get word out there about your product and service, than SBI is a HUGE waste of time and money for you.

Basically SBI is geared towards travel sites, information sites, history sites, how-to sites, and other text heavy sites that are there to teach you everything you ever wanted to know about a single topic. If you are creating an information site on the history of modeling throughout the centuries, yeah, SBI will be good for you, but if you are creating a modeling site that is a modeling agency or is offering services to models, no SBI is going to be very wrong for you.

SBI is great for information sites, but not so good for other types of sites. From what little you've said of your site goals, I think SBI is not right for your site and you'd be happier with either a free host (Webs, Wix, or Weebly) or WordPress.

The people who feel burned and cheated by SBI, I've often asked them about why they disliked it and they usualy tell me they felt cheated because they thought they could set up a site quickly and make a lot of money off GoogeAds. Of the people I've talked to who left, they consistently tell me that while they enjoyed their topic, they did not enjoy writing, and there was simply too much endless writing involved with keeping an SBI site fresh and up to date. They had wanted a site that could generate income on it's own, and not having been professional writers before joining SBI had no clue how hard writing really is. Which is quite understandable, and thus as I said SBI is NOT for everyone, it's not even for a majority of people. If you really love to write and write a lot, and especially write a lot about a single topic for years on end, than SBI will work for you, but if you are not super hyped about writing, you really want to avoid SBI.

SBI is great for people who love this style of website building, but it's a nightmare for people who prefer less writing intensive websites. Unfortunately SBI is not a site you can set up quickly - easy yes, quickly, no. It takes 5 to 6 months minimum just to write the content (and you need 50 to 60 pages before you start getting traffic), most SBI sites (I know several owners personally offline, and since starting SBI myself I have since "meet" many more owners online) only make in the range of $10 to $100 a month for the first 2 years (according to every single SBI owner I've talked to) and does not start to bring in a bigger income until 2 to 4 years into it. SBI ranks fairly high with Google so you'll get better traffic IF you have a lot of pages of text, which is why many SBI sites start earning $2,000 to $10,000 per month once they reach the 3 year mark (Google rewards sites that are "authorities" that have been online several years and are niched with LOTS of info on a single topic, by sending them huge traffic boosts - but you got to stick it out for 3 years and ave lots of pages first.).

Of the people I know personally, one makes about $500 a month on his site, and another makes about $750 a month on his site, while a third tells me she had her site for years making only $200 a month, but than after 7 years it suddenly started bringing in $8,000 a month, and yet another friend tells me her site fluctuates from $100 to $1,000 per month.When I asked them how they made money their answers were all over the place: one said 100% from Google, another said he had no Google ads at all and was using just Amazon; the woman with $8,000 a month - those were sales from products she was selling, including an ebook she had written, and the one with fluctuations was selling hand made jewelry off her site. The thing that each had in common was that after about 3 years each of them had written between 700 to 4,000 pages of text for their sites. SBI works for me because I like the writing intensive format, but I only use it for 2 out of my 200 sites, because it's not the right fit for my smaller websites at all.

Basically you have to sit down and write up a business plan of what your goals are for your website, how you plan to use your website, what your vision is for how your website will look/do/etc, and than research the various host services until you find one that is a match for your sites needs and goals. No one host is going to be right for every site. What works for others may not work for you.

I have been hearing some interesting talk of Google Sites recently. Especially if you link it/yourself to Google Authorship. If nothing else, it could be a decent backlink.


For just $3 or $4 a month you could go with a basic account at LunarPages or so many other webhosts. *Avoid GoDaddy like the plague though* You would have a LOT more control and could easily scale it up, as it grows.

Please note: there are three VERSIONS of Wordpress and each is qualitatively different.

1. Wordpress.com free site offers users a chance to have a site with a subdomain, some limitations, and an upgrade path

2. Wordpress.com (Upgraded): there are different types of upgrades you can have, domain, size, appearance, etc. but you still get the same hosting. There are business & enterprises upgrades, too.

3. Wordpress (self-hosted): You will need to purchase or have available appropriate hosting for your own. This offers you the most freedom, but you also have to maintain the site. The self hosted software is not paid, though of course, you must pay for hosting.

Please don't confuse Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org (the site for the software). Additionally, there was a version of Wordpress that was called 'multi-site' or Wordpress-mu, that is now rolled into #3, but requires a few tweaks to access.

The commercial version of Wordpress (hosted) ie. #2 is probably a little more pricy than self-hosting, but offers a rocksolid foundation and stability. It is a good alternative to self-hosting, esp. for beginners. WP.com offers beginners a special package $99, and a Pro version at $299 per annum.

Kenneth

register your domain with godaddy or whoever you want.
buy a hosting package for just a few dollars a month.
most of them offer unlimited whatever ( not really true but it won't matter to you )
google for free web templates. find one you like and download it to your computer.
youtube for how to use filezilla ftp program.
learn how to use ftp to connect to your hosting account.
use whatever web page editor you like ( I use a text editor ) to make the needed changes to your free web template for your content etc.
use your ftp to upload the web template to your website.

you are done.

now you can work on tweaking the template, adding more content, learning SEO etc. etc.
or, as others have said, put up a wordpress blog.
once you have your hosting account, go to your control panel, find the place where you install bulletin boards, blogs etc. find word press, click the button. done.

no need to pay SBI's rediculous prices for something you can do your self for free.
back in the 90's SBI might have made sense but not now.
no need to make this process difficult.
the difficult part is the marketing.


robert

It appears wordpress.com premium hosting is the same price as sbi. I'm wondering if they both offer similar benefits?