I'm trying to get my own site started up. It's going to be very photo/video heavy, like a gallery of my best photographs and some short travel videos I make.
I'm not very technical, so initially I was considering something like squarespace or Wix for use of their website builders. Then I started to realize that 'hey, nobody wants a free site (no custom domain name), and the price is more like $15 - $20+ month once you get into their paid subscription services, maybe I should look at a free Wordpress site with some cheap hosting (like Blue host?). Couldn't that be better long term and maybe cheaper (or at least more cost effective)?"
I had also read that going with a Wordpress site from the beginning is going to be better in the long run if it were to actually need to scale and if you started gaining a lot of traffic. (i think Mrs. MM says that in her post here about it)
So I'm looking at wordpress sites and hosting and all that, and see that MMM himself, as well as many others, recommend super cheap hosting with BlueHost, so I'm thinking "wow this would be a way cheaper option."
But, I need to build the site - hard to do without a website builder and without knowing wordpress..
Then enter "Divi" and their latest website builder
https://www.elegantthemesdemo.com/?et_fb=1 (link if you don't know what I'm referring to... Basically they put something as capable and seemingly user friendly as Wix on top of WP, and it seems to work really well (from what I can tell without actually getting to demo it myself).
SO, now I'm thinking:
A. Wordpress site (free)
B. use Divi 3.0 to build it (which is like $90/year for a license, or I can just stop paying for the license and the site will keep working but it will not get upgraded), and
C.
figure out where to host it.Which is where you web developer/knowledgeable people come in - I can look online at 100s of comparisons of hosting providers and it's nearly impossible to tell what I need, and also to receive unbiased information (non-affiliate stuff).
If I'm expecting maybe 100 visitors to my site in a day (who knows.. probably much less for a while), should I just go with Shared Hosting on something like Bluehost?
Shared vs Managed hosting?
I don't want to spend a ton of time figuring out all this 'cpanel' backend stuff to keep my site up and running. I don't know what that means. So I'm considering managed hosting, but just not sure if I'm the 'right customer' for that yet.
my site will have big jpegs and videos, lots of pictures... so speed is a major consideration. Does SSD hosting matter? or will they all be pretty fast?
Either way, I have enough 'design' in me to try and build my site myself, that's kinda the whole point actually... I want to extend my creative outlet of photography and share that in a more formalized way.
Thanks for any suggestions or recommendations!