Web Hosting
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Time to look for web hosting. You have two choices, Free or paid.
1. Free Hosting
Free hosting is everywhere but usually with a catch. Many of the better free hosting websites close down after a short while, while the well established free hosting providers have paltry features. Still, for a personal website for family and friends Geocities, Freewebs, or the like would be sufficient.
2. Paid Shared Hosting
Paid hosting comes in all shapes and sizes. However, for the average website builder, a shared hosting plan is sufficient. Many of these have similar packaging so usually the reputable time tested web hosts are used such as Blue Host and HostRocket. Personally my favorite is HostRocket at the moment. Features you should probably check for are PHP, MYSQL Databases, and enough Bandwidth and Disk Space. Unless you are hosting lots of media, be realistic about the actual amount of disk space you’ll need. 1GB is far more than you need.
Even if you are hosting a media website, Blue Host and Yahoo, and I’m sure many will follow in their steps, offer unlimited disk space (within reason).
Below are reviews and examples of good shared web hosting providers:
3. Paid Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting differs from shared hosting in that you get your own private server. This way any issues or decisions will be totally up to you and other peoples websites won’t be on your server so it won’t affect you. Dedicated Hosting usually costs alot more though since they’re selling the server solely to you and not to several individuals.
Good Dedicated Hosts include:
4. Setting up your own server
This is pretty unpractical in most cases. The computer or server you use will have to run 24/7 and without a commercial internet connection, your site will be pretty slow in many cases and you’ll have to deal with installing all the programs and maintain security. If you already know how to set this up and are comfortable with it, chances are you are probably well versed in web design too. Perhaps in the future I’ll create a guide for this.
