Since the first site did so well, I decided to try a second. Here it is: www.usedmacresource.com. It focuses on Apple desktops, laptops and accessories. It didn’t take long for the first site to get indexed, well see how this one takes.

Things have changed a lot in the past 10 years. Designers have more cheap photography resources available than ever before. I started using iStockPhoto about three years ago and was blown away at the quality and quantity of user-generated stock photography, all available for $1-$2 per image. All of a sudden, low budget clients with no photo budget weren’t such a drag. Some of these clients became my favorites.

iStockphoto now has over 2.8 million images contributed by over 50,000 photographers. It includes vector art, illustrations, photos and Flash animations.

Last week iStockphoto came up short for the type of image I was looking for so I decided to try a new service called Fotolia. They’re built on the same microstock model of iStock. Fotolia has 500,000 members who have uploaded more than 2.7 million photographs and graphic illustrations. I’ve not spent much time on the site, but they seem to offer better selection than iStockphoto with regards to certain search criteria. The lightbox function leaves something to be desired, but the Web 2.0ish interface is clean and easy to navigate.

If you looking for an even cheaper option, I’ve heard of people using Flickr to find images and then requesting permission from the owner to use it. It seems like most of the time people are content to permit usage as long as credit is given. I don’t advocate using images from Flickr without permission from the photographer.

It’s maybe not the best time to be a professional photographer, but a good time to be a designer. Long live cheap photography.

There are several companies offering multiple domain hosting on the same account, but I decided to go with Hostgator. The sign up process was simple and I had access to the control panel almost immediately. After pointing my domain to the new Hostgator name servers, I was up and running in about 2 days.

Hostgator offers hosting in a Linux environment and lets you choose from three packages:
1. Hatchling ($4.95 a month) - 350gb of disk space, 300gb of bandwith, 1 domain allowed
2. Baby ($7.95 a month) - 600gb of disk space, 600gb of bandwith, unlimited domains
2. Swamp ($12.95 a month) - 1000gb of disk space, unlimited bandwith, unlimited domains

For my purposes, I decided on the Baby option. It should be noted that the prices quoted are for customers that sign up for multiple years of hosting. A month to month service package at the Baby level will run you $10 a month, still not too bad. The control panel, which I rarely use, is well organized and relatively simple to use. My only complaint is that there is no login available from the Hostgator site.

After having the account for a week, I decided to set up Wordpress and ad a second domain the the account. I’m not a programmer or developer by any stretch of the imagination so I sometimes cringe when I have to create a database or do something that’s not entirely automated. Even though the interface for creating a MYSQL database is not beautiful, it only took me a minute and a half to set it up and in another 5 minutes I had Wordpress installed.

My second challenge was creating an addon domain. I was a little confuse on how this would work and couldn’t seem to figure it out on my own from the control panel. After searching around a bit in the support section of the Hostgator site, I found a link to some Flash tutorials. As a visual learner I find these types of tutorial to be infinitely more helpful than any instructional page, with or without screen shots. So far the Flash tutorials are my favorite part of the Hostgator experience. After watching the tutorial on addon domains it became much clearer how they worked and I had mine up in no time.

There are many web hosting option out there these days. However, if you’re looking for budget hosting and the ability to host multiple domains on the same account, you can’t go wrong with Hostgator.