Monday, October 6, 2008

Choosing a Web Server to Host Your Site

Once you've got your domain name, the next step is to choose a web hosting company. There are lots of companies offering web hosting on the Internet, so it's a good idea to take some time and do a little comparison shopping. You'll want to look at prices, service, disk space and bandwidth, and email capabilities, among other things.

Actually, there are a number of good websites that do the comparisons for you. Here are three of the ones I found very useful:



We checked out a few comparison sites, printed out some charts and did our own side-by-side comparison. One of the sites that jumped out at us right away was BlueHost. We had actually heard about BlueHost from a couple of friends who use it. It was rated in the top two or three sites on most of the comparisons we looked at. So, we felt pretty confident in chooseing BlueHost to host our new website. It has all the capabilities we're going to need, and we will be able to host our own email server. This is important to us, because we can have our own URL (webmarketjournal.com), rather than something like "webmarketjournal.somewebserver.com."

We completed an online application, which only took a few minutes and a credit card, and signed up for a two-year plan that cost us $118. It's an incredible feeling to look at a website address and know it's yours! Right away, we set up our email accounts and even an auto responder email (which I'll go into more detail about in an upcoming post).

Next steps: designing our website and developing the content for it. We'll keep you posted!

1 comment:

Doug Cloud said...

I started my blog on Blogger and eventually bought my domain through them and have them hosting it as well. It's a pretty good deal considering the only thing I had to pay for was the domain ($10).

My folio site was built by a design friend of mine and he hosts it on his own server for free.