New Testingstan

Anyone have any suggestions for online hosting providers? Canadian preferred, but I'm seriously out of the loop when it comes to this stuff now. Last time I did anything with websites, writing HTML in Notepad was still a thing and Frontpage was also a thing. So over 10 years ago, now.

I'm also looking to buy a domain, how do I do that?

Buying a domain is dead easy. You can search to see if a domain is registered or not, or just ask whatever provider you go with and they'll do it on the spot. If you can get it, say you want it and they can have it registered in seconds, it's entirely on a first come first served basis.

I'm actually a domains admin, Australian not Canadian so I can really be specific about .ca domains or registrars except to say they're the best regulated I've seen outside .au ones. I can help you out more with top level domains (.com, .net etc) if you need.

I'd need to know more about what you plan to do to make concrete suggestions, but generally most registrars are the same except in terms of support, and with a bit of savvy and a handy application of google you won't normally need help with the domain name itself. Make sure your get your domain password (not your registrars control panel password, the password for your actual domain) as soon as it's registered. You most likely won't need it for much, but dodgy registrars will delay as long as they can in providing it to you if you ever do because they just assume you're moving to another provider and don't want to give it to you. They can hold you up for a few days, especially irritating if your sit is down.

For hosting, if you need a SLA it's going to be expensive. No way around it. Like, thousands of dollars a year expensive. If you're looking at shared hosting then ram, web space, transfer and processor power are usually fairly well advertised, but the number of HTTP sessions often isn't. Make sure to ask about it, and remember most modern web sites can use around 15 at once for a single browse connection, so if you're allowed about 50 more than 3 users connecting at the same time will mean slower connection speeds and/or 403 errors. If you need more than what they offer on shared hosting a VPS is a good choice providing you or someone you know can manage it. Don't always assume a web developer can, a large firm will but smaller operations are sometimes more graphic design studios than tech oriented and aren't much use trouble shooting issues not related to page layout.

Oh, and make sure you know if you hosting or registration includes DNS hosting as well. Usually it will, but it can catch you out with another fee if you aren't careful.

Hope that helps.

What's the domain going to be used for? Small personal site, business site?

My personal site, will probably be turned into a campaign site by July.

How big a campaign site?

Provincial party executive position. Alberta. So a few hundred thousand views at most, more likely a few tens of thousands of views, between July and late November, bulk in October/November.

Check with adr, that sounds like a job for a small VPS.