Oct 18th 09 Posted by Randy in Site Owners

How to Create a Website – Part II Hosting (cont’d)

As I said previously, There are a couple of ways to go when you go with web hosting.  The true do-it-yourselfer might want to think about installing you’re own web server and hosting your website yourself.  However, most of you will take a more orthodox end-user route and host your website with somebody else.

You can find companies that will host your site for free. Traditionally, the primary drawback to free hosting is you have to upload your files individually or in small group. This is impractical for a website of any size or complexity. The second drawback is the hosting company will get the revenue from any ads they place on your site – and there will usually be ads. But, look around. You never know what you’ll find out there. Great deals appear and disappear like the morning dew. If you know of any good deals, please leave a Comment and let us know!

With the recent surge in popularity of WordPress, there are a number of hosting companies offering special deals on WordPress hosting. This is great for the hosting company because they usually charge about the same as for their cheapest shared hosting, but they give you a lot less. But, if you just want a WordPress blog without a lot of setup issues that sort of deal may be right for you.

One word of caution when choosing a host, some hosts bombard you with confusing advertising and equally confusing sign-up pages. Read everything very carefully. I’ll say that again: Read everything very carefully. Don’t buy anything you don’t understand. You can always buy it later. I guarantee that. Also, consider your particular situation. As an example, when you buy a domain and your domain is your name, unless you’re John Smith, you probably don’t need to buy yourname.org and yourname.net, too. Though, whoever you buy your domain from will probably suggest you snap those up, too.

There are lots of other issues to be aware of when choosing a hosting company. Assuming you are going with shared or virtual hosting (if you can afford dedicated hosting you can afford a webmaster) you won’t have control over the versions of MySQL or PHP they are running. Some of the big name guys won’t even tell you what versions they run until after you sign up. And, if you use a WordPress hosting plan or install WordPress from c-panel, for instance, you don’t have control over the version of that, either. That can cause you a lot of headaches when you try to install certain plugins.

In the next installment, I’ll outline the steps required to buy a domain, setup a hosting account, create a database, setup your email and FTP.