IWeb, Dot Mac, family packs... and Domain names???

Question

I'm a volunteer involved with recreational trails and historical preservation organizations in a rural area. I've been talking with the leadership of these (not-well-funded) organizations for some time about the benefits of establishing web sites for each organization. (Publicizing accomplishments, generating awareness of issues, soliciting support, improving communication, etc.)
Prior to the recent MacWorld SF Expo, I was looking (very warily) at some of the pay-services out there where you can pay so much a month (or a year) for a web-hosting service which would supposedly offer a domain name of choice, server space, and other services. Of course, with this I would have to learn how to use a web design app like GoLive CS or DreamWeaver MX. I'm not opposed to that. Web-based tutorial services like Lynda.com make it more possible than ever before. Still, I was wary about getting my "bang for the buck"; the combination of my time and the hard-won funding of these organizations resulted in wavering enthusiasm.
Along comes Apple's iLife 2006 and the offering of a new Dot Mac Family Pack. Looking over the possibilities, there's something to be said for combining iLife '06 with a Dot Mac Family Pack. If Steve Jobs' hype is to be believed, I could put up nice little web-sites for a decent price and have all kinds of technological possibilities for the future. (If anyone wants to post a podcast, it can be done. Posting pictures of volunteer work and developing issues can be a major breakthrough for awareness and support.)
I'm still concerned about some lingering issues, though. Some of these other web-hosting services offer the means of securing and using your own domain name (i.e., your-organization.org) for a web-site URL and even several e-mail addresses using that same domain name. Still, if I split a Dot Mac Family Pack five ways, that's $36 per site. That's quite a savings over $100+ per year per site that these hosting services were asking. How tough is it to get a domain name, and how much does it cost?

Answer 1

Walt,
Getting a domain name is easy enough, as long as you can come up with one that isn't already taken. You can secure a domain name on sites like GoDaddy.com for less than $10 a year, and it gets cheaper as you secure it for more years at a time. GoDaddy also offers free domain forwarding, meaning: you can have your www.brandnewdomainname.com point to your .Mac url (which will read something complex like http://web.mac.com/username/iWeb/somethingorother). If you don't want the complex .Mac url to show in the browser's address field when people visit your page, GoDaddy will mask it for you for free too. Then, it will just say www.brandnewdomainname.com on every page on that site. If you want each page on each of your sites to have its own easy url, say www.brandnewdomainname.com/about or www.brandnewdomainname.com/contact, you'll have to host with GoDaddy or some other site and pay the price.
If you decide to go with the iLife 06/.Mac combo, the family pack may not be the best thing for you. Have a look at this .Mac page:
http://www.mac.com/1/currencytable.html
For $20 more, you can get twice the server space (4GB), and I think that also includes a lot more bandwidth per month than the family pack, but I am not sure about that. For $30 less, you have the same amount of space as the family pack. What you don't have is the 4 additional e-mail addresses. You can purchase those separately for $10 a year, or, you can use up to 5 free e-mail aliases per account. The drawback to aliases is that messages sent to them will all end up in the main account's inbox, which may or may not work for you --perhaps only if all the e-mails are intended for the webmaster and that is you for all these sites. Of course, you could always list individual non-.Mac e-mail addresses on a contact page, and probably turn them into hyperlinks so that if people click on them, their e-mail app will open a new e-mail addressed to that person. May not be the most elegant way to do it, but if you're trying to save money, maybe it's good enough.
With a regular (non-family pack) .Mac account, you also are not forced to split your server space five ways evenly -- you can host as many sites on one .Mac account as your server space will allow. The main headache for you will be the urls to each individual page of all these sites. If you are picky about them and what exactly they look like, .Mac may not be your thing. Not yet at least. It has the ease of use, but you pay for that in other ways. There's always a trade-off...
Hope that helps a little.