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Starting Your Own Web Site
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Step 2 - Choose a Hosting Provider If you are considering a small website to attract customers, it's better to have an ISP that will host your web page for a small monthly charge. There are free ones, but do you really want your customers to get annoyed with you every time they visit your site? Better to pay for the services and get a reliable host that gives YOU the control of your website. Need a Web Host? A Virtual Dedicated Server? or a Dedicated Server? We can suggest a few that are very cost competitive, and best of all never have any downtime. This is a major biggie! If your host has downtime YOU SUFFER THE LOSS, no matter what their excuse is, your customers will think you are out of business when they can't find you... and you lose a customer. Can you imagine starting an advertising campaign that may have cost you $3,000, $4,000, or maybe even $10,000, and without telling you your host decides to perform some maintenance that week and as a result your websites go down for a few days... this little omission just cost YOU the entire campaign... and if you think they will pay for your loss... well guess again! So, rule #1... be concerned with your uptime.
There are different
packages that will allow your website to grow with your business.
What you want to look for is outstanding support service, high
site availability & best performance, with as web space, bandwidth (monthly
transfer) at inexpensive & affordable rates. You may also
need
ASP Support, Scripting, SSI, PHP, CGI
(cgi-bin), Perl, Python, Fast CGI, anonymous FTP, Java, custom error pages, web
statistics, domain name management, domain aliases, domain forwarding,
sub-domains, email access, email aliases, and email forwarding, or maybe even a shopping cart.
Here are some things to consider: Disk Space and Bandwidth If your site contains mostly text pages, you don't need much space and bandwidth. Most of web pages with a few images take between 10KB to 50KB in disk space. If, say, you want your web site to have about 30 pages, and we use an average size of 30KB per page, then the disk space needed is less than 1,000KB (1MB). Let's say you expect an average of 200 visitors a day to your site, and they look at 5 pages on the site, then the monthly transfer is about 30KB x 200 people x 5 pages x 30 days = 900KB (0.9GB). You get the idea? It is best to leave some room for growth, but don't worry, most web hosts allow you to seamlessly upgrade to a better package if you run out of room. Most small family sites that only feature a few family photos for other family members to view will only need a very little amount of disk space. Depending on the size and quantity of photos it should use somewhere between 500KB to 1MB of disk space and a bandwidth of 500KB to 1GB. Let's say you have a Service oriented business and you want local web surfers to view a website that you built that nicely advertises your business. You have the ability to make it with several pages, maybe featuring images of the service you perform or actual projects you have completed. You can make your website far exceed any Yellow Page Ad you may be paying for. Typically to do this type of website a disk space of 10 to 50MB and a bandwidth of 1 to 5GB would meet your needs. Here is a hosting package that gives you 10 Gigabytes disk space and a whopping 300 Gigabytes of bandwidth for only $6.97 a month and they will register your domain for you, for only $8.95! Small Business sites may need more space and maybe even more monthly bandwidth transfer, depending on the expected traffic. If you will be using a database for your site, try to estimate how big it can grow. Say for instance you want your site to have images, sound files, movie clips, etc. Just check the size of your images and multimedia files on your system, and you will get an idea how much disk space you need. Servers and Network Speed CPU speed and number, RAM size, hard disk type, etc. are the main parameters to check for the servers. Most of the hosts are shared, which means you share the same web server with other web sites. Consider dedicated servers for high-traffic sites, strong security need, or specialized software. Most servers run on either Unix (Linux) or Microsoft Windows NT/2000 platforms. Unix operating system is more reliable and stable and less expensive. Windows are less stable, and more expensive to maintain. If you need a lot of Microsoft technology for your web site, you may consider Windows. Compare a few examples to see the feature differences at Unix/Linux Hosting and Windows Hosting. Network speed depends on the capacity, but traffic load also affects the performance. A few bandwidth references are list below:
What features do you need for your web site? Do you need scripting languages like CGI, PHP, ASP, etc.? Do you need multimedia support, email support, etc.? What database you will use? Do you need E-commerce support? Remember some features are only available on Windows, for example, Access databases. If you used FrontPage to build your site, make sure a Unix host has FrontPage extensions installed.
It is very important to get the type of support you need when you need it. email support and chat support are common, you may need a phone number in case of emergency. Check out the hour restrictions on support. Also browse the host's web site for technical questions or FAQ pages to determine the support and professional level of the host. A web server can go down, most hosts have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, make sure there are some sort of monitoring available, and what are the backup scheme. Also check if the host has security features.
Remember, you get what you pay for!!! There are free hosting, but many require advertising on your site, and they don't provide reliable support. Beware of the word 'unlimited', it's nothing more a marketing term, be sure to read the term and conditions of the host, you will not be getting unlimited space and bandwidth no matter what they claim. Also, remember that quality support is expensive, while disk space are very cheap. Don't overlook set up fee and domain registration fee. Think how long your site will be hosted with the host, then decide if a setup fee is worth it. There are web hosts that don't specify disk space, bandwidth, and all the features, make sure you understand exactly what you will get. After determining the features you need for you site, check out these awesome prices and details.
Step 3
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We will give a FREE LISTING on our Yellow Pages Directory.
