So you’ve decided that you want a web presence for yourself – your very own website. Of course, you have the concept all mapped out and you know what to do with your site once you get started. You just wonder what you need to do to have your website hosted. Should you get a free web hosting provider or should you pay for your solution? Are you supposed to expect the same levels of service from both? Of course not.
Let’s start with going to a free web hosting provider. Why do they give you free hosting? Because they place advertising on your website. That’s where they get their money. They’ll either pop up a window or place a banner on your page. Sometimes, they use advertising frames that get troublesome when you submit your website to a search engine. Whatever it is they use, you need to be sure that you’re comfortable with it. Most websites use no more than 10MB altogether. That’s not very little actually – you could actually fit in several hundred pages in that much. Things can change though if yours is a multimedia website. Some free web hosting providers won’t let you design your page on your own. They make you use their online builder. What do you do if it limits you too much? And make sure that they allow you FTP access to upload your pages. Going free is all about limiting your choices. Many a free host will impose file type and size limitations. Sometimes, they won’t allow you to upload anything other than JPEG’s if you want pictures; and sometimes they won’t let you upload files that are larger than 300 kB. There are many free script hosting services on the Internet that give you the free search engines, forms, mailing lists and all that stuff. You usually don’t need to mess around with Perl or PHP scripts. If you are the kind who wishes for that kind of flexibility though, you’ll need to make sure they give you PHP and Perl access. You also want to make sure that they don’t restrict you about how you can deploy it.
With a paid service you get a lot better service, uptime and usually a lot of flexibility and the web hosting prices are pretty good to for what you get. Look for uptime of 99.9% and a guarantee if you don’t like the service you can get a refund in 30 to 45 days. Free host providers generally place huge restrictions on your bandwidth, commercial providers are generous with the band width and some even offer unlimited. What this actually means is they will give unlimited bandwidth but cut down on speed in some case so slow that your website will hardly load anymore as your bandwidth grows.And make sure that you don’t sign up for an unlimited disk space offer. Usually, you will not need anything like it for your website. It would be a waste of money. Look for a service that gives you full-time technical support. And you should have a proper shopping cart and access to your site through Perl, PHP, FTP, SS age, MySQL.
I recently signed up with Hostgator and set the servers up incorrectly on one of my domains,my site kept shutting intermittently. I couldn’t figure out what was happenning. Luckily Hostgator has 24hr online support within no time the tech support had checked out the dns servers and pinpointed the problem since then I have had no trouble at all. The other servber I have used is Bluehost. They were good just a bit different in the c-panel and I didn’t think the suppport was as good as Host Gator.
That’s my two bits worth hope it helps you with your decision and all the best. If your looking for internet marketing advice just click the link.
