Bollyball

Image sharing and hosting site have been flooding the web these days. Many of us, many times a day desires to own an image sharing site where anyone can upload and share images for free.

Here you will get a complete step by step guide on how to get started with your own image sharing and hosting website.

1. Get Your Domain Name: The first thing to start any website is to get it's domain name. A domain name is simply the name of the website such as bollyball.com. A domain name can cost you anywhere between $7 to $10. My favorite domain registration site is dot.fm and GoDaddy. Both of them have quick domain registration process with an easy user interface.
2. Get an Hosting account: For putting up your matter and letting others to host images on your site, you need space on a server. For this you need to get a hosting account. Although there have been many hosting account providers with various packages, you need to keep few things in mind.
• First, you must look for a Linux Server with PHP 5 support (Lower versions of PHP will do, but it is always better to have PHP 5).
• The Hosting Account must have atleast 10GB of space and 100GB of bandwidth.
• Look for a plan which is less than $100/year.
• My suggestion for a Hosting Service Provider - GoDaddy, Cirtex, Hostnine, Dreamhost and Servage.
3. Get and Install an Image Host Script: This is the most crucial and the most difficult stage of setting up an image hosting website. After getting hosting account, you need to get an Image Hosting Script. There are hundreds of pre-built scripts that can be bought for anywhere between $30-$70. Well, my suggestion for this will be Advanced Image Hosting Script by Yabsoft. You can easily get the Lite Edition for $59 from there. Now, the question comes on how to install it.
   Well, installing Advanced Image Hosting Script is far more easy than other competitive script. However, I would prefer you to get it install it from a professional but here is a quick step by step guide.

• Login to your hosting account control panel
• Setup a MySQL Database and Database User.
• Get an FTP client like FTP Commander, SmartFTP etc.
• Connect to your server through FTP.
• Upload the Advanced Image Hosting Script
• Follow the instruction in the installation manual.
• Be Happy, your image hosting website is up.

I think the above information will help a lot of people who are looking to start an Image Hosting Website. But if you still not able to get your site running, I am always there to help you.

Posted by saurabh on Monday, September 17, 2007 at 10:06 AM | Permalink