What is Website Hosting

Know what your website will be all about
Before you can begin to look for the type of web hosting services that your web pages will require, you have to settle down for something definite that your website will do. Simple and non-commercial web sites will not pose any problem for you and you can easily find a free web hosting service for that.

But if you have maybe read an article about how to make money on the internet and suddenly want to start with 4 or 5 things at the same time…DON’T! Unless you have unlimited resources and a lot of manpower working for you … and EVEN IF … it is always best to run a website as focused on one activity. The reason for this is that you can streamline your web pages and maximize their productivity. Because all your web pages will be available for catering to your targeted audience you can present a bigger catalog of products and services to them. Naturally, all other things being normal and friendly, you will stand a better chance of a transaction.

Plan out the web pages
Once you know what you want to do with your website the next thing is to draw the web pages as you envision them to be on paper. Next you need to get a reliable programmer, preferably someone you know for some time already, to execute the web pages for you. After he finishes encoding the entire site you will know how much disk space you will need to house your website on a server. Then you need to think about the data requirements of the website; do you need a passwords table? a client’s table? a product’s table? How much space will you need to store that amount of data given the maximum expected visitors you expect to be handling from time to time. Again you will need a one-on-one for this with your programmer.

Web hosting for non-commercial websites – your own ISP
Personal websites, websites featuring your pets or hobbies will fit very well into your own ISP’s server, if they offer free web hosting. You might even get a module from them for getting people to sign a guest book or logging the number of hits your website has taken. You just need to be sure that your web pages will fit into the 5 or so Mb of storage they normally allot for these added services.

Free web hosting other than from your ISP
If your website will need about 80 Mb to run you can consider applying to outfits that are willing to host your website for free. The trade-off in this arrangement is that although you will be able to run your website, complete with ads, on a much bigger space, the host may be running his own ads at the same time and these ads may not even be remotely related to your niche, may even scare away your visitors plus! give your website a bad reputation, in case the host decides to spam your guests or hack their ip addresses.

Affordable fee hosting
If you don’t relish all the possible hassles of free hosting, you can enroll with sites who can host your web pages for a small fee. Then you won’t see any ads on your site. However, you need to be sure that the outfit you are going in with is reputable. Start out by looking for big-name companies who sell routers and that kind of thing because they will probably have affordable fee hosting. The only thing you may object to with hosting your website without your own domain is that your url may be a long jumble of characters (intended for security) that will be difficult to type and even harder to remember.

Getting your website a proper identity
To avoid all the problems you stand to meet by improperly showcasing your website, you should consider doing it the way successful webmasters do it. You don’t need to imitate the scope of their websites, just follow their methodology.

1. Get your own domain name. Domain names are aliases for ip addresses. Having your own domain and static ip address will allow you to have a distinctive and standard url format for your website as in http//www.mysite.com, instead of http//mysite.myserver.com, which says very little for your own site. Domain names can be gotten from the same website host you are going to use or a difdferent one. Which you choose will depend on your preferences and cost factors although there is relativly little difference in cost when it comes to domain names.

2. Usually the very site where you purchased your domain name will be able to host your website for you, or visa versa. Many provide free domain name hosting with those hosting a website.

Look for friendly hosts – which probably means nearly all hosts
Owners of web hosting outfits would rather cut their profits to get more clients than lose the money they should be earning from, even if this is just a few dollars, by renting out their server space. A lot of these hosts have a lot of space they want to fill, as it were, and offer up huge discounts so you shouldn’t have much difficulty finding a known and reputable server that can give your website all the right exposure for a reasonable price.

We will be providing reviews of many different web hosts soon.