tkreate

Piwigo is an open source gallery application. Piwigo was initially released in 2002 and renamed from PhpWebGallery in 2009. They have a lot of features, including password protection and a great support system. A big plus is its free and scalable .

the link will take you to a home page to see if it will fit your needs

http://installatron.com/piwigo

ontos Loc: Riverside, CA

Tony Northrop also recommends SquareSpace.

Wendy2 Loc: California

Thank you very much!

Accelerator

Nice web site Robert. Really well done.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Sorry I probably wasn't clear enough.
basically a shared host is a computer which has a number of websites set up on it some of which are yours some are other peoples in practical terms you don't see any difference. Your domain name is your choice.

e.g if you wanted wendy2.com (assuming it was available) then thats what you would have. you can also have subdomains e.g photos.wendy2.com forum.wendy2.com (thats free) if you wanted to share the hosting with another site name say blackest.com that would cost €7.95 for the name for the year and you'd put it in a folder on the hosting say in a folder /bk/ that actually gives 2 ways to address the site as www.blackest.com/index.htm or www.wendy2.com/bk/index.htm both addresses would load the same page.
you could also have myshopname.com as another name which points at wendy2.com then its just an alias. most useful if you want to say have wendy2.com and wendy2.org or if you have a site name which can be misspelt.

Anyway in simple terms you can buy a basic hosting package for around €40 a year get a free dot.com name (of your choice) which is your main hosting name, up to around 200 or so subdomains of that main domain name. And you can buy additional domain names and share that single hosting package. This is ideal for a small startup with low traffic.

if your site is a hit you can move it up to a slice (basically a virtual server) or a dedicated machine or even a cluster. An individual photographer is never going to need a cluster and you'd need to be fairly big to need a dedicated server.

hosting costs go up as you scale up of course but its easy enough to migrate to a more capable hosting solution as you grow. So you can have an idea and start up a site for a few dollars if it is successful you can pay more which will mean it can then service more requests.

Thats one way of doing it, alternatively you can join one of the agency type sites. who have 100's or 1000's of photographers, who charge you an annual fee take a cut of your sales and all you need to do is concentrate on taking photographs. you might do both of course. Being a small part of a larger site can be a good thing in search results they are naturally higher usually getting a place on the front page of relevant google searches.

Do you need that thou or are you happy to advertise to people within your locality say within a 50 mile radius. you can do that with your own site.
On the other hand making a good site can be hard skilled work.

It's not really the cost of a domain name and hosting which is the major cost but if you don't want a cookie cutter website then your going to need someone to design your site and one day of their time will probably cost you more than a years hosting and your domain name.

blackest Loc: Ireland

I guess the only thing i didn't mention was there are any number of content management systems (cms) e.g wordpress being one of the most common. with any number of themes and plugins. You can run on your own hosting, or on a hosting package dedicated to that cms.