If you’re interested in starting a website (a blog, a forum, a business, whatever), then square one for you is deciding on and signing up with a web hosting provider. A web host will, foremost, allot you a designated amount of server space, with which you will host your website.
Web hosting is by far the most uninteresting, headache prone, risky part of becoming a webmaster. Not only do you have to pay an often substantial amount of money for a web hosting provider, but you also have to put a lot of blind faith in that provider, trusting that they will uphold their guarantees of a) providing you with quality web hosting, b) sustaining that hosting, regardless of the nature of your site (and the traffic it might generate), and c) that they don’t screw you in some other way. As such, finding a good web host is a tricky business in and of itself.
Moreover, based on the nature of your website (whether it be business or personal, for instance) might affect your choice of web hosting provider. If you hope your site will grow into a strong community, you will need a web host that offers a sizable amount of disk space, bandwidth, and other things you might be less familiar with like MySQL databases - don’t worry, we’ll cover those later on. Most importantly however, you’re going to have to consider your site in terms of cost vs. capital. Will your site generate capital? If so, we might assume it’s going to be complicated, large, and taxing on a server. As such, how much are you going to have to pay to maintain your site, while still enjoying profits from the capital it generates?
Although costs can quickly add up, there are several methods (which we will explore in greater detail later on) whereby a webmaster (you) can make back some or all of that money, and perhaps turn around and make a profit.
The most important measure you can take, however, and the one that will be explored in detail now, is to ensure that you minimize the amount you pay for your web hosting provider. Although there are many “cheap” web hosts out there, I am of the opinion that most webmasters do not utilize nearly what they pay for. Many web hosts offer “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth. While this is an impossibility in itself (these sites take advantage of the fact that most webmasters will never use their full bandwidth - and if you do, you might find your site suddenly offline, and your account suddenly suspended - it happens, just Google it), why would you presumably pay for “unlimited” when you don’t need it? The point is, you shouldn’t, and you don’t have to.
In fact, thanks to modern XHTML and CSS, PHP and other “Web2.0″ technologies which utilize the previously listed, you can develop complicated websites that hardly tax the servers that host them. Moreover, knowing that you can develop a website that will likely never use a fraction of the space you might pay for from a web hosting provider, it seems counterintuitive to consider buying web hosting (note: this article is directed to the casual webmaster, and one who does not expect to develop a website that will rival industry leaders - if you are one of these people, you should probably ignore this article entirely because you probably know a lot more than I’m going to get into here).
This of course, speaks to another issue. There is no guarantee your website will be successful. In fact, most websites fail, or are left floating alone among other dead websites. The internet is an organic creation, and it is always growing, and there is no guarantee that your website will be able to survive in the environment - there are of course ways to help it along, and we’ll explore those later.
The only logical solution, then, in looking at web hosting solutions, is to consider whether you need paid hosting, or if you should look for free web hosting. There are numerous web hosting providers out there, I use this one. However, I also know of a superb free host. In fact, this host is so good, I’m going to create my next article specifically about this free host, not only because I have used it for some of my websites, but also because I know that it will be so useful to people beginning to explore the realms of webmaster.
In future, we will look at a few options for paid hosting, their benefits and drawbacks, and I will show you a free web host that might provide more than the features you need to develop a full-fledged (www.yourdomain.com, you@yourdomain.com) website.