Web Solutions - Comprehensive and Free

Step 2 - Hosting your site.

Your website needs a home, which is called  a hosting service. A hosting service provides at least two basic things - a computer that runs a web server program and your website information, and an internet connection to that server.  Web hosting is paid monthly, and is in the range of about $10/month for very basic service to $100+/month for advanced services.

Most web hosting service providers offer different options for hosting, ranging in features and prices. Here's a list of possible options and features, explanation about what they mean, and price consideration.

• Dedicated or shared web server. Web Server can be either dedicated (higher cost) which means your website is the only one hosted on that computer, or shared (lower cost) which means that multiple websites are running on the same computer. The end result is virtually the same for most users' needs, so a shared server is fine for most uses.

• Disk space. With most service providers there's a limit on the amount of data you can store on the server. Usually starting at at least 20MByte of disk space, which allows for a small website with some pictures, but most service providers are going much higher than this even at the entry level packages with 1000MB or even 250MB. This decision should be made by the amount of data you need to put on your site - if you plan of having hundreds of high quality pictures on it, you'll end up with hundreds of megabytes of information, if your website will be mostly text, even a 20MB is plenty. Spend some time figuring out what you want on your website, roughly calculate the disk space needed by the size of the graphic files you have, add at least 50% or so for things you skipped and some future growth, and decide by that. You can always buy extra disk space (added to you monthly fee)  from the provider if needed.

• Bandwidth.  With most service providers, there's a limit on the amount of data that is transfer each month from your server - that reflects the amount of visitors and the size of files that they view from your website. Transfer limits can start with 10GB/month, which means about 2500 visits each look at 10 pictures, each picture file size is 50KB. Depending on your website, that can be a huge amount or  a small amount - plan ahead and estimate what you need, it's basically the amount of users/month you anticipate multiply by the size of the file the users will view, multiply by 8 (to convert Bytes which are used to measure file size, to bits which are used to measure bandwidth). You can always pay extra if more bandwidth than your limit is used, or increase the bandwidth allowed by adding to the monthly fee. Note that some service providers measure also the email traffic and file transfer to and from your server as part of the total bandwidth allowed - again, depending on your usage this can be negligible or substantial.

• Email accounts (or POP email accounts).  (yourname@yourdomainname.com). This type of email account allow you to use an email program such as MS Outlook or Eudora for email retrieval and sending.  Usually limited to a specific number of accounts you can create, you have to plan ahead how many email addresses you will need, it can be for specific people (john@ourwonderfullcompany.com) or specific function (sales@ourwonderfullcompany.com). Spend some time planning how many email addresses you will need within a year or so, and chose accordingly. Usually you can increase the limiting amount later on with additional monthly fee.

• Web email access. Some providers provide a service that enables you to access your email not just through email programs as Outlook and Eudora, but also through the web (similar to hotmail or yahoo mail). That enables you to access your email from any computer that is online, not just from your computer. Basically you should choose if you access your email either through the web or through an email program, trying to work with both simultaneously is problematic. This service is usually complimentary.

•  Ecommerce tools. If you plan to have a store on your website, you might want to consider providers that supply you with some built-in ecommerce tools, such as:

  Shopping cart - the ability to have a list of products with a shopping cart functionality, where you can add and remove items to/from the cart, with quantities and total cost. "Miva Merchant" is one of the common shopping cart solutions available.

  Credit Card processing - the ability to charge credit cards online from your website - free you from the hustle of setting facilities for credit card processing. Usually you'll be charged a higher percentage per transaction, but will save you some money and headache of setup and maintenance.

  SSL Encryption - SSL is used to have secured encrypted communication between the user that browse your website to your webserver, ensuring that sensitive information such as credit card numbers will not be exposed if anyone tries to tap into the communication. SSL became common in ecommerce sites, mostly because the companies that are making money out of it rooted fear about the possibility that your card information will be exposed. Never the less, it became a standard and a requirement by the customers. If you are requested by the provider to buy the SSL code yourself, you can get it from a few provider, VeriSign is the most knows although not the cheapest, a lower cost option is Thawte.

Many other options exist, but these are the most common/important ones.