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Website Creation
and Hosting has Become Much Easier
August 13th 2005
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Hosting Services |
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Not long ago there
were few choices when it came to Internet Registration and Hosting.
Today there are endless choices and the costs associated with
website ownership have dropped drastically. We will be discussing
some of the ways a person can create and manage a website.
What should you
name your site? The answer to that question will be determined by
what you plan to use the site for. Chances are the name you would
like to use has been taken. Start brainstorming and writing down
possible names for your site (domain).
After you have
written down a dozen or so possible names you will need to visit a
host / registration site to register you domain name. Not long ago
there was only one choice: Internic.net. The price was $70 per
year just for the domain registration. If I remember right, they
cut you a deal if you registered your domain for 2 years; I think
the price was an “incredible” $135 for two years and you saved a
whopping five bucks over two years.
Nowadays, many
hosts will provide you with a domain name for free if you pay them
to host your site. Yahoo will offer domain registration almost
free. They charge a mere $9.95 per year. This does not include the
hosting cost. They also offer a hosting service. They will host
your .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, or .us
domain name.
Of course there are
other hosting providers. In this article we will focus on the least
expensive way to host. We will not cover dedicated servers. We
will not cover hosting your site yourself on your own computer. If
you decide to host your site yourself, be forewarned, you will spend
a lot of your time with security issues. Dedicated services can be
very pricy and are pretty much reserved for large scale businesses
or people / companies that conduct their entire business on the web.
Let us focus on
some of the least expensive methods of operating a website. There
are some things you need to look for when choosing a host. It is
convenient to sign up with a host that handles your domain name
registration. Like I said earlier, most will not charge you for
your domain name registration if you allow them to host your site.
You can use their
search function to determine if your desired domain name is already
taken. If the desired name has already been taken, the site will
usually offer you alternative names that are close to your original
request.
You can expect to
pay about $10 per month, and in some cases less, for a hosting
service with the domain registration included. They will include
email accounts, ftp services and more.
There are some
features you might want to look for before you make your Web Host
decision. I like the idea of 24 hour / 7 day tech support. Most of
the time I am working on my site late into the night and on a couple
of occasions I have phoned and talked to a live tech support
person. If you use Microsoft FrontPage for your web design, you
will want to make sure they include Front Page extensions. They
should offer PHP, CGI and MySQL services also.
Most will give you
great statistics in an online control panel including how many
unique visitors you receive per day. They will also tell you who is
linking to your website, how many page impressions have been served,
what the most common search “key words” were, how many hits each
particular webpage got and much more.
If you have any comments or corrections please
email me.
By
Dan Wilson
Best Syndication Staff Writer
Website Design Books
Keywords and misspellings: Web Host Hosting
Design Services |
