Getting Your Website Hosted on a Web Server

Once you've got yourself a domain name you need to decide where to park it. Your site needs to be hosted on a web server. The server handles all requests to your domain and serves up your pages.

Web Hosting is not costly. Basic web hosting packages can be found at $10, or less, per month. These shared hosting accounts are more than adequate for most small local businesses. We use asmallorange.com

Shared Hosting vs. Dedicated Hosting

Shared hosting is cheap because the server is being used to host many sites at once. You are sharing space and bandwidth with other sites on the server. These plans are perfect for a local contractor business website.

One small negative of shared hosting is that the server could get overloaded by a traffic spike to one of the many sites on the server. And all sites on the server go offline, including yours, till the server reboots itself.

It does happen but not very often. And considering the relative levels of traffic for a locally based website, these minor interruptions are truly insignificant.

Dedicated Hosting, on the other hand, avoids any such minor inconvenience. With dedicated Hosting you are assigned a box, a server, of your own. It is not shared with any other sites. But its costly. At an average of about $100 per month.

These dedicated hosting plans are better suited to much larger sites, with thousands of pages and millions of visitors. These sites need dedicated servers for its speed, disk space, and assurance of up-time. And they have the traffic and revenues to justify it.

Disk Space and Bandwidth

Most minimum shared hosting plans will have plenty of disk space and bandwidth limits for a local small business website. Disk space is the amount of room your website data takes up on the hard drive. Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred to and from the server.

Most websites for contractors and other local small business will not be large enough or have enough traffic to outgrow most basic shared hosting plans. For those sites that do the host will have upgrade options to increase disk space or bandwidth limits.

Server Type

There are two common types of servers. Unix or Linux servers and windows servers. Unix servers running Apache are the most common types of servers. And we highly recommend Apache servers. As an open-source web server application it couples well with PHP, an open-source server scripting language, and with MySQL, an open-source database application. As well as easy manipulation of URL rewriting and redirections through .htaccess files. And other nifty technical stuff.

Email Accounts

Your hosting package should allow you more than one email address. These will be email address with your domain name. Like steve@mysite.com and sales@mysite.com etc. these can be used for different people in the business or for various other purposes.

We recommend using more than one email address to help manage spam. You will need an email address tied to your domain for various reasons, some of which require that you submit an email address into a web form. Always use a catch-all email address for these type of things where you email address might then be placed on a mailing list, or traded, or sold to another spammer.

Use a personal email address for your direct business dealings with clients, suppliers, etc. Don't use the personal one to register for anything online. Let the catchall address be your spam bait.

These are the basics you need to know about getting your site hosted on a server. There are more things you may need on the server such as PHP and MySQL, but these are installed on just about every Apache server anyways. Most shared hosting plans will cover all these basics.

Plus they will have add-ons and plug-ins like shopping carts, blogs, forums, etc. Most of which you'll never need. They really give a lot away to attract your $5 to $10 per month.

Now You Can Have a Great Website That Send You More Local Business. Ask Us How Today!

Website Basics