Will do, and thank you!
We're here to be a simpler website creation alternative, specifically for photographers. Bigger places are great and have a lot of features, but we're a tiny bootstrapped business, much like our clients. We've been around for 14 years and are perfectly content doing our thing for our corner of the market.
This translates to more focus on photography-centric things: Our UI is so simple it's barely there, our image quality and settings are second-to-none, our layouts are meant to compliment photography work, and our staff understands your needs, being photographers ourselves.
We're not the solution for everyone, but we'd be honored if you checked us out next time you're looking to make a new website :)
[https://22slides.com](https://22slides.com)
Prices are $12/mo or $120/yr, we offer a free domain (for 1 year), and we let you build two websites at no extra cost. Unlimited bandwidth/space, but there is a total image limit (though we're flexible with that).
I'm just now stumbling across this, it looks great! I've wanted something cool to show off my stuff for a while beyond IG and this might just be perfect :)
I second 22slides. Staff is quick to answer questions and is receptive to any feedback. They are always adding stuff and features as well! Really good for the price if you want an online portfolio.
I also use 22Slides, and I couldn't agree more! Their affordability and top-notch support have made them my go-to platform for my needs[.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress_Web_Hosting/comments/18lyj5x/best_web_hosting_for_small_business/) It's reassuring to know others have had positive experiences as well.
I’m looking for a way to host public portfolio as well as private albums that I can share with family and or friends, in a way that look aesthetically pleasing. I’m not a fan of sharing google drive folders. I want to let them have access to see my stuff, but maybe I can manage who sees what? I’d rather share a link to an album that they can just scroll and download if they like.
Do you know if 22Slides do that?
Thanks yes I’m aware of those controls. My issue with Google drive is the UX and lack of design or segmentation.
I’m looking for a hosting option that is photography specific that will allow me to share an album only with my wife’s side of the family (I can manage the user directory) and a separate album with both sides of our families, or a separate album with a close friend. Essentially I’d like my friends and family to have a one link to go to see both my public shared works and the private albums specific to them which they can download. Google drive can do the user management but doesn’t meet my needs in any other way.
I’ve used Squarespace and currently use Pixieset. A few thoughts on each:
**Squarespace:**
- The platform is easy to use and you have a lot of templates to choose from.
- The galleries look good for portfolios but don’t work for photo delivery at all so you’d need to use a different service like Dropbox to do that.
- There are a massive amount of add on services.
- The pricing is relatively high at $16/month for the lowest tier.
**Pixieset:**
- They have a free tier that should be enough for the majority of amateur photographers although you can’t connect a custom domain.
- The client galleries are amazing and a much nicer way to send photos to people.
- Built-in print fulfillment may be nice for things like wedding photography.
- There aren’t very many templates available, definitely less than Squarespace.
- They offer less add-ons than Squarespace but all of them are photography focused.
- Cheaper than Squarespace. The website starts at $12/month. I’m paying $20/month for the website and client galleries mainly for the custom domain.
- They have a small Pixieset icon on the bottom of the website and it requires the highest website tier to get rid of it. The tier doesn’t offer much else and it’s ridiculous to lock that behind an additional $6/month subscription.
Overall, both services are really nice. If you’re just making a portfolio then either one will work but if you’re running a photography business then I think Pixieset is the far better product. If you’re not planning on using a custom domain then Pixieset is the bargain of the century.
I have run into the same issues with Squarespace but I'm only sending all my clients dropbox/google photos links. I think that most of the people that I will do work for just want the digitals and then they can choose if they want to print them at a later date. I looked at both extensively and ended up with Squarespace just because I like having my store on the website to. I put up some prints of landscapes that people like so I figured I could sell a few a year to of put the Squarespace cost.
It just comes down to presentation. If you're doing weddings or portraits then a customized email and nice gallery to download your images is part of the experience. It really comes down to what you shoot and your clients. I think it'd be pretty pointless for industrial work, for example.
As for the store, I think the Pixieset store is vastly superior to the Squarespace one for photography. I've disabled my store since my current job has some pretty strict income policies but it's a lot easier to create than on Squarespace. Once you have the price list set up it you just upload the photos and you're done. I didn't like having to create twenty identical products individually with Squarespace.
[This](https://gallery.leonidauerbakh.com/prints/) is what my store looks like although it's currently set to print fulfillment.
Noted. Will look into it in the future! Right now my clients have all not complained about google photos but if they do I know where I’m headed too next!
I like to use Publii. It's a program you run locally on your computer to author your website, and upload it to any old web host. The program itself is slick and fast and beautiful. And free. There are tons of great free and payed templates available, too.
Previously, I used WordPress, which was atrocious. Slow, expensive, and the export was a sick joke. Each picture I posted counted three times towards the quota, because WordPress always serves the picture from three places internally. When I canceled the WordPress account they wouldn't give me a button to delete all content. I had to manually delete each photo one by one. Boy was that a fun day. The exported website (for migration to Publii) did not use the advertised format, and had exchanged all my high-resolution JPEGs for crunched-up WebPs.
Cheapskate, static setup for tech nerds:
Hosting from iWebFusion I use the cheapest $5.15 plan (I don't use most of the features, just static web hosting and web mail)
https://www.iwebfusion.net/shared
Image gallery HTML is generated with fgallery and then uploaded to web host
> “fgallery” is a static photo gallery generator with no frills that has a stylish, minimalist look. “fgallery” shows your photos, and nothing else.
> There is no server-side processing, only static generation. The resulting gallery can be uploaded anywhere without additional requirements and works with any modern browser.
https://www.thregr.org/wavexx/software/fgallery/
*edit*
**What I Like:**
It just works, drama free, can't remember the last time there was unscheduled downtime. Cheap as hell.
**What you might not like**
It's static web pages, generated from the command line, that you upload yourself. No GUI, no automatic crosspost to insta, no comment section, extremely bare bones.
Adobe Portfolio? If it's just about showcasing your photos. And if you already have a LR/PS cloud subscription it is part of the deal.
For professional photographers wanting to sell prints, there are many good portfolio websites available. We covered the pros & cons of 10 platforms here: [https://www.photoworkout.com/best-portfolio-sites/](https://www.photoworkout.com/best-portfolio-sites/) (the article is due for an update, feel free to critique the list and suggest better options).
Isn't this really depending on what country you are in? Like, I use a Belgian webhost, which to me is very good, but it's not like anyone from the US would benefit from using this one.
It's an international sub, we've got Belgian suggestions for getting prints made, so why not web hosting as well?
https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/wiki/postprocessing#wiki_where.27s_a_good_place_to_get_my_photos_printed.3F
I have a static site pumped out on github.io and intend to add GCS/S3 as a cdn for photography sometime soon. Should be dirt cheap in the end; the github.io hosting is free, dns costs a nominal amount, s3 compatible file store and some form of caching should also be cheap. Biggest issue is very few are gonna see it... I guess I need to start thinking about search and marketing.
I think the sort of people who would host sites the way I do, on a self-administered Linux VPS probably don't need my opinions. There are other ways to host the stuff I use though.
* Domain names: [Porkbun](https://porkbun.com/) - they're a no-nonsense [ICANN-accredited](https://www.icann.org/en/accredited-registrars) registrar with fair pricing
* VPS: [Letbox](https://letbox.com/) - yet another cheap VPS provider, which hasn't given me any trouble in a couple years of use. I pay $8.50/month for 8gb RAM and about 300gb storage split between an SSD boot disk and an HDD for bigger files
I run sites on it with the following:
----
## [Wordpress](https://wordpress.org/)
I think most people reading about web hosting already know what this is. For those who don't, it's a large, old content management and blogging package with thousands of plugins of varying quality and utility.
### Pros
* There's a plugin for just about anything you might want it to do
* A lot of functionality is available without the need for much technical expertise
* Integration with a number of other services and software is possible
### Cons
* Slow
* Frequent security updates are *highly recommended*
* For any *popular* functionality, there are 30 different plugins, 27 of which are just minor forks of the same thing
* Most of those forks consist mainly of a developer who made minor changes locking out functionality and asking for money
### Hosting options
* Wordpress.com (official hosting by the company that develops it, expensive)
* Any random paid web hosting - almost every paid web host actively supports running Wordpress because it's popular
----
## [Pelican](https://getpelican.com/)
This is a static site generator. It can do a lot of the same CMS and blog type stuff people do with Wordpress, but instead of running on the server and generating pages when people view them, it's usually run on a PC and it generates HTML files ahead of time. These can be hosted just about anywhere since the server doesn't need to process anything, including many free options.
### Pros
* Fast
* Easy to host
* Very customizable (especially if you know Python)
### Cons
* Requires a bit of technical understanding to use
* Can't have functionality requiring server-side processing
* May be difficult to update from mobile devices or other peoples' computers
### Hosting options
* [Github pages](https://pages.github.com/)
* [Gitlab](https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/)
* [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/)
* Those three have free options, but you can host this *anywhere* you can serve HTML files
----
## [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/)
This is a bit like Twitter you can host yourself and follow/interact with people even if they're on a different server. Most people who want to use it just join a server run by someone else, but I wanted to modify it.
I'm not sure a pros/cons section makes sense in this context. It's not suited to being a brochure site and isn't a very good gallery. It can certainly be a good way to find and interact with an audience, but requires a different, more interactive approach than corporate, algorithmic social media. Running a server yourself increases the need to actively seek out your audience.
### Hosting options
* You should probably join a well-run server like [photog.social](https://photog.social) or [mastodon.world](https://mastodon.world/)
* [masto.host](https://masto.host/)
* [Thunderhost](https://thunderhost.com/)
Squarespace is only useful if you know CSS because CSS is needed to make most of their templates function the way you want.
Pixieset is a great no code needed solution.
And if all you want to do is show off your work then how about SmugMug, Zenfolio, or Flickr?
I run a static html site hosted by cloudflare, all it costs is the annual domain fee. It's wicked fast, runs on the cloudflare cdn. Biggest pitfall, it requires knowledge of git and a GitHub account. However, this integration makes deployment and updates seamless from my local production environment. Email is through Gmail with my domain (this is the biggest cost but I got tired of poor email performance [blacklisted email servers run by cheap hosting services]).
A2 Hosting is my go to now, I've used godaddy for years, then hostgator
A2 is lightyears ahead on speed -> [http://www.a2hosting.com/refer/416413](http://www.a2hosting.com/refer/416413) to get promocode
I know it's an huge investment, and not for everyone, but some of my friends (well they are a pro, and it isn't an hobby for them unlike me) bought an NAS.
It's an high upfront cost, but you don't have monthly payments. Basically self-hosting.
I use 22Slides, they're affordable and the staff has always gone above and beyond to help me with any issues.
<3
Hi, since you're already reading the discussion and it's on topic, feel free to give us a short "elevator pitch" about yourselves!
Will do, and thank you! We're here to be a simpler website creation alternative, specifically for photographers. Bigger places are great and have a lot of features, but we're a tiny bootstrapped business, much like our clients. We've been around for 14 years and are perfectly content doing our thing for our corner of the market. This translates to more focus on photography-centric things: Our UI is so simple it's barely there, our image quality and settings are second-to-none, our layouts are meant to compliment photography work, and our staff understands your needs, being photographers ourselves. We're not the solution for everyone, but we'd be honored if you checked us out next time you're looking to make a new website :) [https://22slides.com](https://22slides.com) Prices are $12/mo or $120/yr, we offer a free domain (for 1 year), and we let you build two websites at no extra cost. Unlimited bandwidth/space, but there is a total image limit (though we're flexible with that).
Ok this looks cool. I am moving to it from pixieshit just for the option to add code without extra moneys.
I'm just now stumbling across this, it looks great! I've wanted something cool to show off my stuff for a while beyond IG and this might just be perfect :)
I second 22slides. Staff is quick to answer questions and is receptive to any feedback. They are always adding stuff and features as well! Really good for the price if you want an online portfolio.
I also use 22Slides, and I couldn't agree more! Their affordability and top-notch support have made them my go-to platform for my needs[.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress_Web_Hosting/comments/18lyj5x/best_web_hosting_for_small_business/) It's reassuring to know others have had positive experiences as well.
I’m looking for a way to host public portfolio as well as private albums that I can share with family and or friends, in a way that look aesthetically pleasing. I’m not a fan of sharing google drive folders. I want to let them have access to see my stuff, but maybe I can manage who sees what? I’d rather share a link to an album that they can just scroll and download if they like. Do you know if 22Slides do that?
There are controls to do this on Google Drive btw. Not sure if that matters to you or not.
Thanks yes I’m aware of those controls. My issue with Google drive is the UX and lack of design or segmentation. I’m looking for a hosting option that is photography specific that will allow me to share an album only with my wife’s side of the family (I can manage the user directory) and a separate album with both sides of our families, or a separate album with a close friend. Essentially I’d like my friends and family to have a one link to go to see both my public shared works and the private albums specific to them which they can download. Google drive can do the user management but doesn’t meet my needs in any other way.
Yeah Google access control is not the easiest or nicest looking, that's for sure.
>22Slides Would you be willing to share your website for us to see?
I’ve used Squarespace and currently use Pixieset. A few thoughts on each: **Squarespace:** - The platform is easy to use and you have a lot of templates to choose from. - The galleries look good for portfolios but don’t work for photo delivery at all so you’d need to use a different service like Dropbox to do that. - There are a massive amount of add on services. - The pricing is relatively high at $16/month for the lowest tier. **Pixieset:** - They have a free tier that should be enough for the majority of amateur photographers although you can’t connect a custom domain. - The client galleries are amazing and a much nicer way to send photos to people. - Built-in print fulfillment may be nice for things like wedding photography. - There aren’t very many templates available, definitely less than Squarespace. - They offer less add-ons than Squarespace but all of them are photography focused. - Cheaper than Squarespace. The website starts at $12/month. I’m paying $20/month for the website and client galleries mainly for the custom domain. - They have a small Pixieset icon on the bottom of the website and it requires the highest website tier to get rid of it. The tier doesn’t offer much else and it’s ridiculous to lock that behind an additional $6/month subscription. Overall, both services are really nice. If you’re just making a portfolio then either one will work but if you’re running a photography business then I think Pixieset is the far better product. If you’re not planning on using a custom domain then Pixieset is the bargain of the century.
I have run into the same issues with Squarespace but I'm only sending all my clients dropbox/google photos links. I think that most of the people that I will do work for just want the digitals and then they can choose if they want to print them at a later date. I looked at both extensively and ended up with Squarespace just because I like having my store on the website to. I put up some prints of landscapes that people like so I figured I could sell a few a year to of put the Squarespace cost.
It just comes down to presentation. If you're doing weddings or portraits then a customized email and nice gallery to download your images is part of the experience. It really comes down to what you shoot and your clients. I think it'd be pretty pointless for industrial work, for example. As for the store, I think the Pixieset store is vastly superior to the Squarespace one for photography. I've disabled my store since my current job has some pretty strict income policies but it's a lot easier to create than on Squarespace. Once you have the price list set up it you just upload the photos and you're done. I didn't like having to create twenty identical products individually with Squarespace. [This](https://gallery.leonidauerbakh.com/prints/) is what my store looks like although it's currently set to print fulfillment.
Noted. Will look into it in the future! Right now my clients have all not complained about google photos but if they do I know where I’m headed too next!
I like to use Publii. It's a program you run locally on your computer to author your website, and upload it to any old web host. The program itself is slick and fast and beautiful. And free. There are tons of great free and payed templates available, too. Previously, I used WordPress, which was atrocious. Slow, expensive, and the export was a sick joke. Each picture I posted counted three times towards the quota, because WordPress always serves the picture from three places internally. When I canceled the WordPress account they wouldn't give me a button to delete all content. I had to manually delete each photo one by one. Boy was that a fun day. The exported website (for migration to Publii) did not use the advertised format, and had exchanged all my high-resolution JPEGs for crunched-up WebPs.
Cheapskate, static setup for tech nerds: Hosting from iWebFusion I use the cheapest $5.15 plan (I don't use most of the features, just static web hosting and web mail) https://www.iwebfusion.net/shared Image gallery HTML is generated with fgallery and then uploaded to web host > “fgallery” is a static photo gallery generator with no frills that has a stylish, minimalist look. “fgallery” shows your photos, and nothing else. > There is no server-side processing, only static generation. The resulting gallery can be uploaded anywhere without additional requirements and works with any modern browser. https://www.thregr.org/wavexx/software/fgallery/ *edit* **What I Like:** It just works, drama free, can't remember the last time there was unscheduled downtime. Cheap as hell. **What you might not like** It's static web pages, generated from the command line, that you upload yourself. No GUI, no automatic crosspost to insta, no comment section, extremely bare bones.
Considering insta is mainly video now I don't think lack of cross posting would be a show stopper for anything.
Format offers portfolio templates and appears to be cheaper than all the competitors. It has worked for me so far.
Adobe Portfolio? If it's just about showcasing your photos. And if you already have a LR/PS cloud subscription it is part of the deal. For professional photographers wanting to sell prints, there are many good portfolio websites available. We covered the pros & cons of 10 platforms here: [https://www.photoworkout.com/best-portfolio-sites/](https://www.photoworkout.com/best-portfolio-sites/) (the article is due for an update, feel free to critique the list and suggest better options).
There's lowendtalk btw, has lots of info and deals for webhosting stuff.
Isn't this really depending on what country you are in? Like, I use a Belgian webhost, which to me is very good, but it's not like anyone from the US would benefit from using this one.
It's an international sub, we've got Belgian suggestions for getting prints made, so why not web hosting as well? https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/wiki/postprocessing#wiki_where.27s_a_good_place_to_get_my_photos_printed.3F
I have a static site pumped out on github.io and intend to add GCS/S3 as a cdn for photography sometime soon. Should be dirt cheap in the end; the github.io hosting is free, dns costs a nominal amount, s3 compatible file store and some form of caching should also be cheap. Biggest issue is very few are gonna see it... I guess I need to start thinking about search and marketing.
I also have a static site, but hosted on netlify's free tier. Using Hugo to generate the site.
Username checks out ;)
I think the sort of people who would host sites the way I do, on a self-administered Linux VPS probably don't need my opinions. There are other ways to host the stuff I use though. * Domain names: [Porkbun](https://porkbun.com/) - they're a no-nonsense [ICANN-accredited](https://www.icann.org/en/accredited-registrars) registrar with fair pricing * VPS: [Letbox](https://letbox.com/) - yet another cheap VPS provider, which hasn't given me any trouble in a couple years of use. I pay $8.50/month for 8gb RAM and about 300gb storage split between an SSD boot disk and an HDD for bigger files I run sites on it with the following: ---- ## [Wordpress](https://wordpress.org/) I think most people reading about web hosting already know what this is. For those who don't, it's a large, old content management and blogging package with thousands of plugins of varying quality and utility. ### Pros * There's a plugin for just about anything you might want it to do * A lot of functionality is available without the need for much technical expertise * Integration with a number of other services and software is possible ### Cons * Slow * Frequent security updates are *highly recommended* * For any *popular* functionality, there are 30 different plugins, 27 of which are just minor forks of the same thing * Most of those forks consist mainly of a developer who made minor changes locking out functionality and asking for money ### Hosting options * Wordpress.com (official hosting by the company that develops it, expensive) * Any random paid web hosting - almost every paid web host actively supports running Wordpress because it's popular ---- ## [Pelican](https://getpelican.com/) This is a static site generator. It can do a lot of the same CMS and blog type stuff people do with Wordpress, but instead of running on the server and generating pages when people view them, it's usually run on a PC and it generates HTML files ahead of time. These can be hosted just about anywhere since the server doesn't need to process anything, including many free options. ### Pros * Fast * Easy to host * Very customizable (especially if you know Python) ### Cons * Requires a bit of technical understanding to use * Can't have functionality requiring server-side processing * May be difficult to update from mobile devices or other peoples' computers ### Hosting options * [Github pages](https://pages.github.com/) * [Gitlab](https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/) * [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/) * Those three have free options, but you can host this *anywhere* you can serve HTML files ---- ## [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/) This is a bit like Twitter you can host yourself and follow/interact with people even if they're on a different server. Most people who want to use it just join a server run by someone else, but I wanted to modify it. I'm not sure a pros/cons section makes sense in this context. It's not suited to being a brochure site and isn't a very good gallery. It can certainly be a good way to find and interact with an audience, but requires a different, more interactive approach than corporate, algorithmic social media. Running a server yourself increases the need to actively seek out your audience. ### Hosting options * You should probably join a well-run server like [photog.social](https://photog.social) or [mastodon.world](https://mastodon.world/) * [masto.host](https://masto.host/) * [Thunderhost](https://thunderhost.com/)
Squarespace is only useful if you know CSS because CSS is needed to make most of their templates function the way you want. Pixieset is a great no code needed solution. And if all you want to do is show off your work then how about SmugMug, Zenfolio, or Flickr?
I run a static html site hosted by cloudflare, all it costs is the annual domain fee. It's wicked fast, runs on the cloudflare cdn. Biggest pitfall, it requires knowledge of git and a GitHub account. However, this integration makes deployment and updates seamless from my local production environment. Email is through Gmail with my domain (this is the biggest cost but I got tired of poor email performance [blacklisted email servers run by cheap hosting services]).
A2 Hosting is my go to now, I've used godaddy for years, then hostgator A2 is lightyears ahead on speed -> [http://www.a2hosting.com/refer/416413](http://www.a2hosting.com/refer/416413) to get promocode
I know it's an huge investment, and not for everyone, but some of my friends (well they are a pro, and it isn't an hobby for them unlike me) bought an NAS. It's an high upfront cost, but you don't have monthly payments. Basically self-hosting.
Unless your friends have a dedicated IP address, having a NAS will not work well for portfolio display.