Web Hosting - how to choose a Web Host

When you've wandered around the Internet for a while you eventually realise that what you need is your own website.

A website is basically renting space somehwere on the Internet.For this you have to find a Hosting Company.

This will always be on someone else's computer or server as Internet hosting computers are known.

(After all you don't want thousands of users dialling in to your home computer do you ?)

This can vary from a single page often ( free ! - but will carry ads from other companies...) up to your own dedicated machine that lets you resell space to other users.(This is called a reseller account and I'll go into that more in my next article)

Free pages usually carry advertising from the hosting company and can be useful.(Take one and link it to your own website !)

For now lets assume that you need a chunk of webspace big enough to hold several pages or up to 50 pages .
This is easy to find and the fees for this go from a few dollars a month upwards.

Even large companies like Yahoo offer small websites at reasonable prices.

You usually have to pay either 6 monthly or yearly in advance or sign up with a standing order with a credit card or
PayPal account to pay the Hosting company monthly. This lessens the initial cost but is more expensive over a year.

Things to look out for - as a starter account, you should look for 300 Mb of space together with a number of email accounts
(your family can then each have their own email address).

This should be big enough to keep you going for at least 6 months and you can then upgrade if you need to.

Your Best bet is to choose one of the larger American companies for Hosting - I use Hostgator - a very large company
who have excellent service (when you need advice with your website you need help FAST -right ?)

I've found that larger US Companies like Hostgator usually give better service and cost less !

Click on the Gator for more details

There are of course many other large companies that offer excellent service too.Check out what they offer
and make a list to compare other companies for what you think you will need.
If you need to sell things then you'll need a shopping cart and a company to process credit card payments.
Most large companies will arrange this for you.

Some of the packages at companies like hostgator include blogs,forums and databases too.

The next and really important thing that you have to do is to choose a DOMAIN NAME this is just the title of your website
and it has to be unique. (So don't try calling your site by a well-known name or they'll send their lawyers after you !)
Unique names are now harder to get. See my article on the Domain Name Services for an alternative.
Your Domain Name should be directly related to your website activities - and to get the best placing on the search
engines (Google,Yahoo etc) your KEYWORD that relates to your business should be the FIRST word in the website title.
(If it's the middle or last word then you won't rank as highly when people search for businesses like yours.)

Popular Subjects are harder to get domain names for - and you should make a list of names you'd like and then type them into your hosting company (any decent hosting company will certainly have a name checker you can use before you even sign up with them ) Hint - if you can't get the name you want try putting an s at the end or splitting the name up with a hyphen like this :

MyWebsite_ishere.com.

Your hosting company will offer you lots of alternatives if your website name is not available.

Try www.godaddy.com who have a very low cost website and domain name service.

You will be offered various suffixes but try to go for the .com suffix if possible as this is the most common business domain suffix.

There's more on choosing a web hosting company HERE

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Please note that though we believe the information to be true in these articles

You should ALWAYS check them out for yourself -

The easiest way to do this is to search on a reputable search machine for the name of the program or service offered.