Web Hosting Info

Before you pick a website, make sure that you have everything ready to upload and you have tested your website. You should read our guide on things to do before buying web hosting.

Most people use small hosting packages to host small sites that don’t get many hits. If you expect your site to be small in the beginning, then buy shared hosting package. As your site gets bigger you can increase your hosting needs.

Larger websites use dedicated servers which can handle larger masses of traffic and generally allow for more bandwidth usage. You really don’t need dedicated hosting unless your site is large or you are hosting a lot of domains.

If you are starting out small, you shouldn’t spend anymore than $4-10 a month on hosting. As your site gets bigger, hosting costs will of course increase. Dedicated hosting usually starts at $120+ a month. It’s also important to note that if you are anticipating quick growth for your site, find hosting who offers a 2-6 month contract as opposed to 1-2 years. It will cost a few extra dollars per month, but you won’t be stuck paying $X a month for months you aren’t even using the service.

You may first want to read our guide to buying a domain name here.

If you are creating a website for a business the most obvious choice for a domain name would be your company name . However for some companies their name may already be taken. You must think carefully about the name you choose, once you have picked it, you will have to stick with that domain or face confusing your visitors.

Unfortunately most good domain names with the TLD (the extension such as .com,.net)  .com have been taken so you may want to consider regional ones such as .co.uk for the United Kingdom, .de for Germany etc. .net is a good global one. If you are creating a company website, try stay away from the tld .biz or .info. As these are very cheap to register spammers have purchased them and the general public associate them with a scam and it does not look professional enough.

Try keep your domain name short as it is easy to remember. Also try avoid having dashes or plurals in your name to avoid customers. If you must have a name with a plural, register ones that are similar to avoid people registering that one and stealing your traffic.

Make sure that you buy from a reputable comapny such as Godaddy.com, Namecheap.com or enom.com

Hopefully you have now chosen your website’s subject. You now need to create your website using a web editor. A web editor is a program that helps you create web pages by automatically creating HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) which is understood by a web browser. By using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, you can create good looking sites without having to learn HTML.

Things to consider:

Content

On the internet, you are not restricted to using words. You can include photographs and music clips. You need to add some words though so that search engines will list your site in their rankings. Give each page a title indicating what information the page contains. To do this add the title within the <title> tag in the HTML.

Make sure that the content is well spaced out and not too long. People don’t like reading lots on the internet so try keep it short and sweet.

Layout

It is a good idea to design your website on paper first. You then have some idea of what you want to create when you get round to making it in a WYSIWYG editor.

Once you have created your pages, save it in a folder on your harddrive. The homepage should be saved as index.htm or .html.

Before you start creating a website you need to pick the subject. There are many reasons people build website for example;

•  Advertise and sell things. Websites allow companies to provide up tp date information about their products and services. Customers can order and pay for things that are advertised on the internet.
• Fan site. Fans and enthusiasts devote their site to places, people, movies or TV shows they enjoy.
• Share the knowledge. Owning a website allows you to share useful information with millions of other people.
• Family. If you have family and friends around the world, you can easily share your pictures and movies over the internet for them to enjoy.

For your first site it is a good idea to pick a topic that you can write lots about and enjoy.

Shared Hosting is where many web sites are hosted on one server which is shared with other customers.

Shared hosting is useful as it can be purchased cheaply, however sometimes other users on the server may have sites that slow the server down affecting your web sites performance. If another user on the same server sends out unwanted emails, your server’s IP can become blacklisted. With shared hosting, you can not customize what is installed on the server or edit files such as php.ini which allows users to modify the settings of php.If you are starting out small, you shouldn’t’t spend anymore than $4-10 a month on hosting

When purchasing a domain name some companies may include web hosting, you do not have to use this included hosting although it may cut costs.

Recommended for: Personal Web sites, Small Businesses and other low traffic web sites.

Reseller hosting allows you to host domains and "resell" hosting on. Many small web hosts resell hosting.

It is useful as it, like shared hosting, can be purchased cheaply and software and hardware are managed by the parent hosting company. If someone owns a few web sites but does not require a VPS or dedicated server, this is what they will use. The downsides are similar to shared hosting, you don’t have as much control as you do with a dedicated server. On the other hand, with reseller hosting, you can host more than one web site which saves money. Reseller hosting also gives you a lot more web space and bandwidth.

Recommended for: Company with multiple low traffic website, intermediate users.

We do not recommend using a company that resells hosting. Find a host that actually owns the equipment.

When you select a domain name, you will have to specify how many years you would like to register it for. When it your domain name is about to expire, the registrar you registered your domain with should send you emails reminding you.

Some TLDs such as .co.uk have a minimum registration of 2 years, most however allow you to register a domain name for a minimum of 1 year.

If your hosting company purchased the domain name for you, contact them about renewing the domain name.

You can check the expiry date of a domain name using a WHOIS tool such as the one provided here.