Free or Paid Web Hosting?

In our last post, we discussed choosing a web host -- the company or service that will rent you disk space and provide all the services you'll need to put your website up on the Internet.

At first glance, you might wonder, "Why would I pay for web hosting when there are so many services offering it for free?" When setting up your first web site, it's a great idea to explore all the possibilities before making your ultimate choice for a web host. But remember the old adage, "You get what you pay for."

Obviously, all web hosting companies have to pay for the services they provide somehow. The most common way they do that is by placing their ads on your site, and you will have no control over the type of ads.

Additionally, there are lots of limitations to what you can and can't do on the free sites. Some of the most common limitations of free web hosting services are:

• Limited storage space and bandwidth.
  
• Limited services.
  
• The content you put up may be restricted. For instance, you may not be able to sell certain things.
  
• And sometimes, free web hosting companies simply disappear overnight!

Many of the "free" service providers count on a certain percentage of people eventually upgrading to one of their "paid" packages when they realize the limitations of their free service.

So, it's important to really analyze your current and future needs. It's possible you won't require a lot of storage space, bandwidth, or technical services. In that case, you may be okay at least starting with a free web host - especially if you're not particular about advertising being on your site.

If you want to compare some of the free options available, some good places to start include:

• Free Web Hosting Reviews
  
  
• Absolutely Free Hosting

On the other hand, paying fees to a web hosting service will usually buy you:

• More storage space.
  
• More bandwidth.
  
• Better technical service.
  
• More services such as databases, email accounts, and mass mailers.

The bottom line is, if your long-range plans include developing a unique, profit-making website on its own, you will probably be best served by going with a good, paid web hosting service that offers all of the capabilities and services you think you're likely to need.

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:

• Host Critique
  
  
• BestWebHosting2008
  
  
• Top 10 Web Hosting

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!

Acquiring a Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is a lot of fun, and also a great learning experience. Because your domain name defines you in a lot of ways, it's definitely worth taking some time and consideration. We actually ended up putting a lot of thought into the choice of a domain name for our website: webmarketjournal.com.

Here are some of the things we wanted our domain name to do:

• Generally describe what we do.
  
  
• Be easy to remember and easy to spell (so if someone only hears it once, they can type it as a url).
  
  
• Be a name we can use not only as a website url (webmarketjournal.com), but also as a company name (Web Market Journal), and possibly in an 800 telephone number (1-800-webmarket, for example).
  

Once we decided what we wanted for our domain name, we needed to find out if it was available. There are lots of places on the web where you can check to see if a domain name is taken. We started with WhoIs.com . They have a LOOKUP button where you type in a domain name and it tells you if it's available. If the name you're looking for is taken, you can see who owns it, and a lot of times the contact information is there so you can contact the owner and see if the domain name is for sale.

Some other good domain name search sites we found are:

• Instant Domain Search
  
  
• Domize
  
  
• NameBoy
  
  
• Domainsbot
  

We were actually pretty surprised when we found out that webmarketjournal.com wasn't taken!

We definitely wanted the .com extension, rather than .net, .org, or any one of the other extensions. Frankly, it's much more common, and people tend to type it automatically. If you have to settle for another extension, you run the risk that people will still type .com and be directed to someone else's website.

It's hard to describe the thrill we felt when we officially owned our very own domain name!

Coming up next... choosing a web hosting service.