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Links to services and applications referenced in this article: HostMonster.com Professional web hosting. A good service with competitive pricing. WebHosting- For-Free.com A truly FREE web host. (These are hard to find and don't always last.) Omnis.com Domain name provider. Good service with fair pricing. Internic.com Public information regarding internet domain name registration services. FileZilla A FREE and very useful FTP application. (filezilla-project.org) Inbox.com Free web-based email service. Mozilla Thunderbird An excellent FREE email application. (mozilla.com) Creative Graphic Solutions.BIZ Design, Web, and Print Services |
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Setting Up Your Own Website This article gives some practical advice on selecting and purchasing a domain name and web hosting service. You may choose to let your internet provider or another agent handle the details involved in setting this up. However, knowing how the business works and handling some things yourself offers several advantages. First, you'll have more control over your own website, which can make things easier if you need to switch service providers in the future. Second, you'll have the confidence to be more selective of the hosting company you choose; you can shop around to find a the better deal or to find the service that best suits your needs. Shopping for a Commercial Web Host A web hosting service, among other things, provides the server space for a website and connects it to the internet. As you shop around online for a commercial web host, make a list of the specific features you need. Do you need a shopping cart or multiple email accounts? How about a chat room, live audio, or password protected pages? Will the hosting company help you set things up? If you're going to have a site that is complex or that requires security, you will need to hire or contract a webmaster, or be one yourself to make sure everything runs smoothly. A webmaster may want certain hosting features such as support for a specific programming language, telnet access, or access to raw traffic files. When comparing the various hosting services out there, be aware that companies may advertise a lower price than you will get by displaying the annual price for a multiple-year subscription. Watch out for setup fees too. The quickest way to discover hidden fees is to begin the process of ordering online without providing payment. Within a few pages you should find more details about what you are ordering, how much it costs, and what it includes. After you've decided upon a hosting company, you should read their service agreement and make sure there are no cancellation fees or other policies that may cause you trouble. Make sure the company provides free phone-based tech support. If the company only provides chat-room tech support you may not be comfortable hosting your site with them. Commercial web hosting can cost around $100 or more per year. A good hosting package with phone-based support is available through HostMonster.com for $83.40 per year (as of September 2008). This is the same service which hosts Creative Graphic Solutions.BIZ. Shopping for FREE Web Hosting If you find a company that offers free web hosting, visit some of the sites they host to see how they load. A free hosting service might have much slower downloads than a commercial service. A page that doesn't load fast enough turns visitors away. Keep this in mind, especially if you use heavy graphics or multimedia. Try to find out how reliable the hosting service is. If you're running a business your site needs to be available to your customers all the time. Make sure you know what "free" means. If a service is "free" but the company asks for your credit card, it may be a good idea to stay away. Find out if the service provides FTP access or another acceptable way of uploading and maintaining your site. If a host only offers web-based file uploading, it may be difficult to manage a large website. By the way, If you need a FTP program, you can download FileZilla at filezilla-project.org. This program is very useful, and it's free. Find out if the service puts advertisements on the sites they host. If they do, make sure that what they are advertising will not give your site a bad image. Find out what types of advertising techniques the hosting service employs. Pop-up and pop-under ads create a bad user experience, while banner ads may be tolerable or even welcomed. If you want to use your own domain name, make sure the hosting service supports this. If it does not, your domain name provider might offer a forwarding service so people can still get to your site using your name. The downside to forwarding is that your host's web address, not yours, will be displayed in your clients' web browsers, and search engines may not associate your domain name with your site. WebHosting-For-Free.com (as of December 2008) offers free hosting with no advertisements and with a monthly data transfer of up to 1,000MB, (roughly 800 pages of text and graphics downloaded per day). FTP access and domain name support is also provided. Another free hosting solution might be right under your nose. Your internet provider may offer limited hosting with your internet account. However, this may only be available for personal or non-commercial use. Creative Graphic Solutions.BIZ offers a domain name and free web hosting for 1 year to clients who purchase a 1 page web site. Domain Name Setup When putting your business online, you will want to have a domain name, (example: www.yourwebsite.com) so people can get to your site easily. A service provider may offer both web hosting and domain name registration. However, I recommend purchasing your domain name and web hosting separately. Domain name registration is inexpensive, and keeping it separate from your web host will allow you to easily change your hosting company if they become unreliable, they raise their prices too high, or you find out you need a feature they don't provide. Omnis.com offers domain name registration for $6.95 per year (as of January 2009). Other companies may offer the service for even less. If you are only purchasing a few domain names you may be more interested in finding a provider that you're comfortable working with, rather than trying to save a few dollars. By securing a domain name for several years at a time you can get a better rate and not have to worry about annual renewals. (You can do the same with your web hosting service. However, purchasing web hosting for only a year at a time may make it easier for you to switch web hosts later on if necessary, depending on how they do business.) To find out if a domain name you are interested in is available, go to www.Internic.com and do a "Whois" search. While you're there you can also view a list of accredited registrars; companies authorized to register domain names. Most registrars include the service necessary to connect your name to your website, (and these are the types of companies I am referring to in this article) but if a registrar is unrealistically inexpensive you should make sure about this. As the owner of a domain name, you will need to point it to the correct address for your website. This can be done online through your domain name provider. The address you need to use will be provided by your web hosting company, (and will be the address of a name server). A hosting company may provide you with an email address that matches your domain name, (yourname@yourwebsite.com). They may include such features as multiple email accounts, email forwarding, and auto-responders. However, if you already have a web-based email account, (such as Yahoo or Hotmail) it's a good idea to keep it as a secondary account for when a mail server goes down temporarily, (it happens) or if you need to change web hosts. Another benefit of web-based email is that you can access it from any computer that has an internet connection. If you're looking for a web-based email account, Inbox.com offers a good service with a nice address. For business purposes, an email application such as Microsoft Outlook Express may be more practical to use than web-based email. A hosting service that provides your email account will also provide you with the information you need to configure your email application, (username, password, mail server address, etc). Setting everything up properly might require a call to tech support. I recommend the flexible and free Mozilla Thunderbird email application. Because it is free, you can worry less about compatibility issues when archiving or transferring stored email. You can load the same application on each of your company's computers and on new computers that your company purchases. Thunderbird supports multiple email accounts, and is available for Windows, Max OS X, and Linux systems. Creative Graphic Solutions.BIZ offers support for setting up and using the Thunderbird email application. Making Your Website Live Once you have a domain name and someone to host your site, you can upload your web pages to your server to make them live. If you don't have a way to upload your web pages, remember the free FTP application I mentioned, FileZilla, available at filezilla-project.org. If you know even a little HTML you can create your own web pages. However, if you lack the expertise to create the kind of website you really need, you may want to consider hiring a web developer. Creative Graphic Solutions.BIZ offers web design, consultation, and technical support, as well as marketing services, logo design, business printing, and more. Thanks Thank you for reading this article. I hope you are now more familiar with the various components involved in running a website, and that you have found the links I've provided to be helpful. If you have any comments about this article or would like me to address something you didn't find here, let me know my emailing me at the address below. Copyright Dec 2008 - Jan 2009, Matthew Shockey |
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