Project Hosting, A Common Question

Ok, you’ve finished your project, you’ve taken great notes along the way and photographed every step. Now you want to share. Where will you post it? There are a lot of options out there, private hosting, Hackaday,  instructables, and tons of others. How can you decide? Here are some handy break downs to help you figure it out at a glance.

Each has its own pros and cons. Take a peek at our list after the break and share your own as well.


1. Send it to Hackaday.com
What? Hackaday will host my project? Yes, possibly. We won’t host everything, but we really do like to host cool stuff. As far as we’re concerned, it isn’t much different from linking to your project on another site.  We still write an article, we still give you full credit, you just don’t have to put it up elsewhere.

Pros: Tons of readers. Free.
Cons: Not a system where you can log in and edit. You send to us, if it is cool, we post it.


2. Instructables.com
This is a very common option. It is easy to set up, quite popular, well promoted. However, we see complaints about it daily due to the cons.

Pros: Huge reader base already there. Tools to make documenting easier. Free.
Cons: The advertisements are overpowering sometimes. People have to log in to view all of your photos.

 


3.Your own private site.
Absolute control.

Pros: You have full control of the look, feel, and behavior.
Cons: This can cost a little money for hosting and be time-consuming. It isn’t that fun if you hate web design either.

 


4. A forum.

This is a pretty common one. It can be nice to follow along as a project develops but popular ones can string out over many pages. It can get tiring trying to dig the important information out of a popular forum thread.

Pros: You have full control of the content.
Cons: not a great layout for following a project. People might need to log in to see it.

Our Suggestion:

Your own personal site. Sure, it can be a pain to set one up and get hosting. Ultimately though, you have the most control of your content. With Fantastico becoming more common on hosts, you may not even have to learn any html. Just pay your hosting fee, log in and push a button and you have wordress or joomla or drupal installed.

Tell us what other places you host your projects and why you would choose them. Would anyone like a basic tutorial on setting up a simple site to host your own project?

79 thoughts on “Project Hosting, A Common Question

  1. come on people you’re all knowledgeable about the series of tubes called the internet. Use Adblock!!! I literally don’t have any ads on my instructables not even a banner ad. I know that firefox and opera both have ad blocking extensions surely chrome and safari have something similar.

  2. For $130 I got my own slice of a server, with SSH, MySQL DBs, DNS control, 100GB storage, 1TB transfer per month, and my own domain, for two years.

    If you’re cheap, you can get smaller packages for like $3.95/month.

    I just used GoDaddy because it has pretty awesome customer service and it was super cheap.

  3. I use hostmonster, its similar to your plan M4, but godaddy pissed me off when they blamed my ftp server being down on my ISP … for 4 months and tested over 4 different ISP’s

    adam yea its not that much of a brainier, in 2010 if you don’t have ad block installed, well the internet is just 1 big ass animated classifieds ads of used car salesmen garbage

  4. nearlyfreespeech.net is my recommendation for hosting your own site. They are very cheap, and in fact are free if nobody visits your site. You have to do all the work yourself though (installing blog software, writing html, etc.)

  5. It appears that Make Projects doesn’t have the ability to upload files other than images. Seems like most HaD projects are dependent on code or other types of uploads. Kind of a bummer!

    I’ll probably host it myself until something better comes along.

  6. give your project its own myspace page. you get a place for pix, a dedicated email. your project gets friends. code can be posted as a blog entry. this supports versions. code could be copy and paste forcing open source(pro or con) updates could be submitted as comments.

  7. Another for those wanting their own hosting and version control, is a cheap vps. I currently have one costing about $7.50USD for 3 months (need a domain aswell, but theyre also dirt cheap with a bit of looking), provides all most people will need.

  8. @techyguru, @Necromant

    That’s the solution I’d generally prefer as well. On the other hand, I know some ISPs block inbound connections on port 80. (I’m looking at you, Cox, you….cox)

    Hosting a webserver off of port 81 means all your visitors have to remember that in addition to a domain name

  9. I’m one of those people who tries to build what they like for themselves, like my own instructables/flikr type codebase for my pictures and projects.
    But… I’m such a lazy bastard, my pages consist of no formatting and just the pictures for you to figure out for yourself – All I need are animated GIFs with “Under Construction” and I’m set! project-diy/icanbuildit/123labs are a few of the domains I’ve got idling :o

  10. use free blog systems like posterous, blogger, wordpress.com, etc

    but please, do not upload your images to there!!! ever!

    you will loose the same upload time, but they will convert it to crap before saving.

    upload all images to flickr! and then link from the blog. flickr is so !@%$ good it also serves as a backup. was nice to have all my project pics after an HD crash. in full size.

  11. For projects with significant code, or projects with collaborators, I favour code.google.com. You get version control, a bit of wiki, and it’s all easy and free. Here’s an example:

    http://code.google.com/p/theeyestheywalk/

    For everything else, I keep simple HTML pages on a site that I pay for hosting on. It’s very low-tech but very reliable, so I now have a history of all my projects stretching back for years.

    Personally, I would avoid a blogging platform for this stuff, because each platform seems to have a fairly short life, and I don’t want my docs to evaporate.

  12. I have a GoDaddy hosted site and a self-hosted site running off a machine in my closet.

    I think it would be great to see a series of HaD server tutorials. Part 1: Setup, Part 2: Securing. Part 3: Hello World. Part 4: etc…

    You could outline different ways of accomplishing this- Headless, additional task for existing machine, registrar hosted… Pros and cons vs. skill level…

    I would be particularly interested in a post about commonly overlooked security oversights. Even pros and cons for what you could do with a private server… I’ve thought about adding a mail server to my existing headless closet machine, but would it really be worth it? How can someone set up a discussion forum for their friends…

    uh… yeah… enough drunken rambling for now.

  13. i ran my paintball turret project on a shared hosting account then a VPS when load increased, both from ghettohost.net… good host. operated by the people from datapimp before datapimp folded, i think. they talk a big game about not supporting their customers and requiring you to know what you’re doing, but i got a lot of free help with setting up a wiki and also forums.

  14. I wouldn’t encourage people using their personal site, especially for serious projects.

    What if the person in question gets hit by a train and nobody will pay the hosting fees? His site will go down for sure and all its content will be lost.

  15. @Tweeks

    Make that an additional rounded average of $0.14/hr due to their account fee… So you create an account and pay $110.95 per month on Rackspace cloud.

    “** In addition to the hourly service fee of 12¢/hour per server, a $100 flat, monthly account fee will be assessed when at least one server on the account is active. The account fee is not reflected in the above pricing as it is not a per server charge but an overall account fee no matter how many servers are active on the account.” http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing/

  16. Free is nice but free has a habit of disappearing for some reason or another. The limit bandwidth of free means an interesting project could be Hackadayed. Kudos to those who offered free hosting, but that hosting depends on your continued ability to afford it. Personally I think that the free services provided by Google, and Instructables will be the most enduring. Hate all you want on Instructables, but chance are using Instructables will give you the best odds of your project being seen by the most people. So Instructables is a for profit enterprise, but they do deliver great for free product. Sorry Caleb the ads at Instructables are no more intrusive than the ads here at Hackaday.

    I have considered both renting server space on the web, and operating here at home. Both depend on my ability to afford the ongoing costs.

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