Webhost recommendations (Domain, Site and Email wanted)

[valve90210]

I'm in the process of setting up a private practice and want to sort myself out a domain, email service and a small basically static webpage...ideally for as little cost as possible.

I currently have one domain, which I use for personal stuff, registered through 123reg, so I was considering using them for the domain name. They also do web hosting and email but I've no experience of what they are like for that.

Anyone got any recommendations of good hosts? I remember back in the day TSOHost and Vidahost were normally the ones people recommended but I'm guessing this might be very out of date now.

Oh and I should probably add that I'd quite like something that makes it reasonably simple to build a nice looking website but have sort of ruled out Squarespace and Wix as they don't include email and they are a touch pricy...

 

[valve90210]

That's for all the thought's, I think for now I'm going to focus on getting the domain and office365 so I can have email and use Teams for remote client meetings.

For a website, I'm trying to decide if the simplicity of wix or such will be worth the extra cost compared to a wordpress site on a host like zume for example? How feasible is it to create your own reasonably simple website; basically a home page with a few sections of content, a couple of additional pages with session fees, services offered, a couple of downloadable files (privacy policy etc) and a simple contact form?

I've had a bit of a tinker with a wordpress playground thing which seemed like it would be fairly easy to build something in, but I'm pretty clueless with regards to making sure it's all secure and gdpr compliant etc.

 

[valve90210]

It's not simple at all if you are just starting out. Expect to spend many many hours working things out. As a beginner you'll be able to create some basic pages (after many hours), but it won't necessarily look that good.

From a design point of view I'm pretty confident I can work with templates and get something looking nice, as I do design work as my day job. It's more the technical side with things like the functioning contact form, policy downloads and keeping the site secure that I'm wary about.