Web Hosting is the Next
Step
With your domain
name registered,
the next step is to set up a web hosting account, to 'rent' space on a
computer (known as a 'server') from where your website can be presented
to the world via the internet.
There are
literally
hundreds of companies in the web hosting market, each of them vying for
your business. However, you have to be extremely cautious when
selecting a web hosting company because it does not necessarily follow
that the company or organization that immediately appears to be the
best will in fact be the company who provide the highest level of
service.
For instance,
because
the web hosting market is an extremely competitive place, many web
hosts use rock bottom prices as their main point of attraction. The
problem with this is that the majority of web hosts who charge what
quite honestly represent uneconomic prices do so by cutting or skimping
on the services that they provide.
This is a
critically
important point to grasp because you are always reliant on your web
host to keep your website live and on the net. You want your site to be
visible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and anything
that potentially threatens that visibility is a threat to your business
as well.
Unfortunately
however,
no matter which web hosting company you choose a, there is always a
possibility that your site will occasionally have problems, times when
for example it might 'crash' meaning that no visitor is able to see
your site or learn about what you have to offer.
In this case, you
must
been 100% confident that your web host has 24 hour service so that they
can repair your site no matter what time of the day or night it is.
The chances are
that if
you go for a web host who is charging rock bottom prices, they will not
provide 24 hour service, working only normal working hours instead. In
this case, your site and therefore your business could be offline for a
period of 12 hours, during which time you could lose an awful lot of
sales and money.
In short, choosing
a web
host because they are the cheapest is normally a completely false
economy, a move that will save you a couple of dollars every month but
might ultimately cost you several hundreds of dollars over the course
of the year.
Most reputable web
hosts
guarantee a certain percentage 'uptime', meaning that they guarantee
that your site will always be alive for a guaranteed minimum percentage
of every hour, every month. Consequently, you should check with any web
host you are considering using what their uptime guarantee is, because
it is crucially that your site is up at all times.
You also need to
consider the amount of disk space that the web host you are considering
using offers. Check on the bandwidth that would be associated with your
account should you choose this particular host too.
Whilst the
majority of
webmasters never come anywhere near using their full allocation of disk
space (which basically equates to the number of megabytes of
information that make up your site), bandwidth represents the amount of
traffic or number of people who can see your site every month.
Hence, you need to
make
sure that the web host you're considering offers sufficient bandwidth
to enable everyone who tries to visit your website to do so
successfully.
Another important
consideration is that some web hosts are far more internet business
friendly than others. This is important because if your host
understands the demands and requirements of online business, they are
far more likely to be flexible than would be a hosting company who are
not particularly au fait with the world of online commerce.
For all these
reasons,
the web hosting company that I would recommend to get you started is
Hostgator.com which is a hosting company that is used and recommended
by many thousands of experienced online marketers.
They are a hosting
organization that is well versed in the demands and requirements of the
online marketing community, they offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee and
they use the excellent cPanel through which you control your site:

As you can see
from the
screenshot, Hostgator even offers a free site building program
resource. Although this particular site builder is not primarily
focused on building the kind of website that you need for online
marketing purposes, it is nevertheless a reasonable fallback option
that you can use to construct a site extremely quickly should the need
arise.
There are
undoubtedly
cheaper web hosts in the market than Hostgator but at $7.95 a month for
their more-than-adequate 'Baby' hosting plan, this represents a deal
that is pretty unbeatable when everything that is offered is taken into
account:

You will for
example
note that the bandwidth and disk space is unlimited as is the number of
domains that you can host under the same account.
In effect, you
could
construct as many websites as you want attached to as many domain names
as you can afford and host every one of them on the same account. Were
you to do so, the fact that there is unlimited disk space and bandwidth
available means that you really only need this one hosting account at
least for the foreseeable future.
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