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Web Hosting
Once you created your set of web pages you need to find a place
to put them on (other than your own PC of course ). That is what
web hosting is all about. I've tried a lot of hosting companies
out, so these are impressions from my personal experience.
If you are limited by a strict budget you can use free hosting
companies. The basis behind this idea is that "free hosting"
company will put a banner on every page of your site, or create
a pop-up window that will appear every time someone visits your
website. This is the basic down-side of "free hosting provider"
besides of usual lack of "advanced" functions , which
really are not so advanced (CGI scripting, SQL databases etc. you'll
need all of that even if you are semi-serious about your e-biz).
But in first few months of your business (or if you intend to use
them for your secondary websites) you can do fine with some of these
free hosting providers, and later pay (2-10$ per month) for removal
of banners and/or for some extra functions.
This site is hosted with Netfirms.com
, they have CGI and Frontpage support (but no PHP nor SQL) their
servers are stabile and somewhat fast in free option , they have
online support for all hosting options etc. The most important is:
they are reliable. The other good free service is Tripod.com
, they had some problems but it seems that they have improved their
service with new servers, also they have some of very nice functions
even in "free option" like FrontPage support, CGI and
Perl scripting... Besides these two, there are Hypermart, Spaceports,
Freewebsites, I've used these three before, and comparing them to
the other free providers they were working great. You have to take
in mind that free servers don't tend to last long, and you never
know if your account is going to be canceled for no obvious reason.
Nevertheless, there are nice searchable lists of free web hosting
providers at www.Freewebproviders.com
and www.Freewebspace.net
so you'll probably find one that will match your needs.
If your budget is not quite that tight, I can suggest some of the
companies. These are the the companies that I currently host some
of my sites with : Nitromax, Cheapnethosting and Hostx2. Nitromax
is very fast and reliable, I think they offer the most advanced
functions. They offer 400MB of space ( I think that would be more
than enough for almost anyone, I haven't managed to use more than
50MB and I have A LOT of jpegs on my site), 100 POP3 accounts, unlimited
data transfer, FrontPage, SSL support, 24/7 technical support...
I am EXTREMELY satisfied with them. The price of 35$ per month doesn't
seem too much for the services offered.
A little cheaper ( 60$ per year ) is Cheapnethosting,
they offer you 1000MB and unlimited bandwidth. 1GB of space seems
useless unless you are going to have tons of wavs and pictures on
your site or if you're going to partially use it as a storage facility.
And there is Hostx2,
my personal favorite because it has the best performance/cost ratio,
for 20$ per month you get 100MB of storage space, 25 POP3 e-mail
accounts, SQL databases, web-based control panel, CGI plus you get
some preinstalled scripts, great FTP access, support for all FrontPage
2002 functions... I've used it for some months now and it works
just great. The most important is they GUARANTEE 99.9% uptime...
The uptime is the time servers are up and running, which is of utmost
importance, because if your provider is down (along with your website)
and search engines spiders try to index your site (it's being done
a couple of times per month, depending of the search engine) your
site will dropdown on SE list. That's why I host different sites
with different providers, if one goes down my other websites will
remain on their positions. This is very important information, and
you should look up for a guaranteed uptime.
There are several other web hosting companies, I haven't tested
them my self but I heard they are very good too: DotEasy,
34SP (only
2$ per month, but you shouldn't expect much much out of them), Fallcreektech...
There are searchable directories of hosting companies like www.HostIndex.com
or www.HostCompare.com
and you'll surely find the one that will suite your needs.
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