Begin with the viewing experience
A portfolio is usually visited with a purpose: someone wants to understand your work, assess a project or find a specific series. Hosting is part of that experience. If the first photograph arrives slowly or the next page fails, a carefully edited sequence loses its rhythm.
Begin with a small representative collection. Include a landscape, a portrait, a dark image and a photograph with fine texture. View them on a phone and on a larger screen. Judge the pictures at their actual display size before deciding how much data every visitor needs to download.
Keep originals separate from the website
The public portfolio should contain delivery copies, not your only archive. Keep master files and working edits in a separate backup process. A hosting backup may help restore a release, but it is not a replacement for a photographic archive.
Organise a release as a set of pages and assets that belong together. Keep the previous set available until the new one is checked. This makes it easier to reverse an accidental crop or a missing image without reconstructing the entire site.
Make availability part of the choice
Ask how uploads, HTTPS, traffic limits and support work on the selected plan. A static portfolio may need very little application code, yet the network serving it still matters. Koddos offers DDoS-protected web hosting alongside other hosting services. For an image-led publication, compare the plan’s storage, transfer and publishing access with the way you deliver your work.
Before using the main domain, publish one complete series. Follow its links, open an image-heavy page on a mobile connection and rehearse a small correction. The best arrangement is one you can maintain while concentrating on making photographs.
Keep in mind
- Keep the archive outside the web release
- Test a full series on mobile
- Retain the previous version
- Check support and traffic conditions