Get Yourself a Website - Without the Drama
So, you're done with the free web hosts. Gone through Geocities, Angelfire, Fortune City. You're exhausted with the pop-ups and banners. You want a real site. But where to go? You look around the net, and the possibilities seem endless. 20 MB of space for only $20 a month! Wow! That's fantastic!
Or is it? Way back when I bought my domain and signed up with a web host, I was the typical "the internet is so wonderful" optimist. I was thrilled to find something that sounded just about what I kind of wanted - and bam, just like that, $300 poorer and with a useless chunk of web space that wouldn't even work properly. My domain addresses wouldn't connect, my content was being warped - things weren't looking too good for me.
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What's In A Name?
One of the more common questions asked by people doing business online is "Should I get my own domain name?" If price is the overwhelming concern, it is less expensive to host under your provider's name. However, there are major advantages to having your own domain name:
Credibility
Having a web site address like www.yourcompany.com always looks better than www.someoneelse.com/ customer/a-z/ WhereAmI/ and shows that you at least spent the money for your own domain. It's much easier to remember, too.
Portability
If your hosting provider goes out of business or gives you poor customer service, having your own domain name allows you to leave and go to another provider without having to change your web site address.
Manageability
A domain name gives you multiple e-mail addresses such as sales@domain.com, info@domain.com, you@domain.com instead of user@isp.net. You can change your dial-up ISP without having to worry about changing your e-mail address as you can have them all forward to the new one.
"Brandability"
If your company name is Best Shoes, having a domain name such as www.bestshoes.com helps promote your brand and helps people find your company on the web. Also, with around 200,000 domain names being snapped up every month, it is a good idea to register yours before someone else does!
Network Solutions is one provider of domain name registration services, and charges a fee of $70 for the first two years. After the first two years InterNIC will bill $35 annually per domain name. This is in addition to what the hosting provider charges to set up your account.
One word of caution: When obtaining a domain name make certain that your hosting provider has you listed as the Administrative Contact for the domain name (i.e. the "owner"). Otherwise you don't have ownership of the domain and you will be at the mercy of the provider should you ever want to leave and keep your domain name.
By the way, there are important differences between domain hosting and Virtual Server hosting. While both give you the advantages of a domain name, you should still be aware of the differences and make an educated decision when choosing a hosting provider.
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Free or paid web hosting? Just finished your first website? So it's the time to look for some hosting and make a choise. Your first qustion probably will be whether to choose free or paid hosting service. Let's have a look at some advantages and disadvantages of these solutions.
Free web hosting: (+) It's for free. You don't need to pay for domain name. (-) Your URL will be something like http://username.freehost.com or http://freehost.com/username. As I noticed above, the advantage is that you don't need to pay for domain. But note that if you move your website to another provider in the future you can loose some or all your traffic (there are some solutions how to solve this problem but it is not the point of this article). (-) Your provider will probably include ads to your pages - usually 1 or 2 banners, sometimes popup windows. If you plan to use banner exchange on your site read carefully their Terms and conditions. Some free hosts doesn't allow it. (-) Free hosts usually allow lower bandwith then paid hosts and a lot of them don't offer futures like PHP and MySQL. (-) A lot of free hosts change their Terms and conditions during some time. If your free host offers hosting wihtout ads now, don't be surprised when banner or popup appears on your site in the future. (-) Sometimes happens that free hosts cancel their free service and longer offer paid hosting only. In this case you have only 2 choises - pay them or loose your website.
Paid web hosting: (+) You can host your own domain. If you decide to change the web hosting provider in the future, you easily transfer the domain to the new provider and don't loose your traffic. (+) Most paid hosts offer 24/7 support via email or live chat and some of them provide toll-free phone support. (+) You can expect better uptime then on free host. Some paid hosts offer uptime guarantee. (+) Paid hosts usually offer enough disk space and bandwith. Futures like PHP and MySQL are standard. Even if you are not programmer you can download plenty of free PHP scripts from internet. (-) Paid hosting coast money :o) Before you make the decision if choose free or paid host you should answer this question: How big ambitions do I have with my website? If you are starting small personal page for your friends consist of a few *.html files then free host will be sufficient. In case you plan to run serious business website, need PHP, database and don't want ads on the site I recommend to look for quality paid host.
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