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Setting Up Your Own Website |
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Setting Up Your Own Website |
Web hosting has become a big, competitive business. There are many good companies available, and each offers slightly dfferent features. Make sure your host has the features you need.
For example, if you are using FrontPage, make sure the host offers
FrontPage support. (Better still, switch to a new web creation package, such as CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer, since Microsoft has withdrawn support for Front Page and replaced it with Microsoft Expression.)
Some hosts offer shopping cart software as part of their plan;
many do not. Others have different plan levels. For instance,
www.GoDaddy.com
starts with a "free" web page for the price of a domain name registration, but offers a larger plan for a full website and a range of ecommerce plans.
Another thing to consider is how mission critical your information is and how important security is.
Green Geeks and micfo
offer daily backup as part of their basic plan.
The next important thing to check is their customer service.
This is hard to gauge, because you may not find out their service is good
until you're stuck on something and they don't know any of the answers.
See what kind of support they offer. Do they have online chat as well as
a support ticket system? Can you call them? Sometimes, a small company
like Next Millenium, will give more
personalized service from a knowledgeable generalist, and you won't have to
go through a telephone thicket to get to a human. On the other hand, www.GoDaddy.com
is a very large company but provides excellent chat and telephone support, usually with almost no "on hold" wait.
You can check the hosting company's "uptime", meaning the percentage of time their servers have been running properly for the last two or three months. However, all computers are machines, so eventually, they'll have problems. The important thing is to find a competent company who respond quickly in an emergency. Besides learning the hard way, the only way to check out a company beforehand is to ask someone knowledgeable or go to a site such as Webhostingsearch.com that lets you search their directory by type of service offered and give reviews of the various companies they list.
Sometimes, despite good reviews and glowing sales pitches, you
won't know till after you sign up how good the company is. Their servers
may be slow, or their support poor. So sign up for the shortest term they
offer, usually one month, just to make sure you like them. You can always
switch to their cheaper, more long term plan later. In fact, many companies, such as Homestead.com
offer a free one month trial
The other thing you MIGHT want to consider is the company's "carbon footprint". Green Geeks buys wind energy credits to offset their energy consumption. At $4.95 a month, they offer a free domain name and site builder.
There are actually companies who will host your site for free. this is usually a REALLY BAD idea. Free can actually be quite costly if your site is slow, or it's frequently unavailable or you can't get the statistics on your visitors. If your business or organization depends on your website. it's worth the $70 or so a year to get a proper host. Also, usually a free host will put their ads on your site, and you don't usually get your own domain name.
Having said that, there is a company called Yola, that offers free web hosting. You don't get your own domain, but for $25 a year, you can upgrade to an ad-free site. There's also Wix, which lets you build and host a website from templates. The site is free, but to get your own domain name (e.g. www.mywebsite.com), you have to pay about $4 a month. Still a good deal.
If you only need one page, you can just register your domain name with GoDaddy.com They throw in a free starter page with registration of domain name and they are a very large and reliable company with excellent phone support.
