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Creating Your Own Website:
How to Choose a Website Host

by John Burch, from Forex Tools Cafe
Used with permission.

You want a website. In that case you need to find a company that provides space on a shared server computer at their facility. This is called an Internet host

There are many hosts out there and they offer many different packages that you could buy. It will be a subscription, usually with a small down payment.

I recommend Host Rocket since I've used them for years and have only good experiences with them. Other reputable hosts include Dotster, GoDaddy, Hub (aka WebhostingHub), iPage, and many more. You can read reviews of the different website hosts, and compare prices and perks at WebhostingGeeks.com, WebhostingSearch.com, and other review sites.

Hosting Tools You'll Need

Each host offers a slightly different array of tools. The main tools to look for are:

Enough space to hold your site
Enough bandwidth to support your activity (bandwidth is explained below)
Mail
Databases

How Much Space Do You Need?

We can only estimate and then you should double or triple that to be safe. In reality, you can get more space than most people will ever need. Consider these situations and their estimated file sizes:

A few simple HTML pages on the web - 0.05 megabytes
Ten pages with twenty big pictures - 0.20 megabytes
A Wordpress installation without content - 15.0 megabytes

(continued below)

Adding content could increase your space needs by from 1 megabyte to some unlimited amount. 1 gigabyte (1000 megabytes) is a LOT of space. And most hosts offer 1 to 25 gigabytes. It is always better to have more space than you think you will ever need.

Bandwidth

This is the measure of how much data will be downloaded by the site users each month. If you have a few web pages, a few articles, a few pictures then it will be inconsequential. But if you have large files that are very popular, the web site will need more bandwidth. I have a 70 meg file and a 50 meg file that have been very popular and it would have shut my website down if I had not had unlimited bandwidth on the site. Or rather my host would have shut it down due to the large volume of data that was being used.

Hosting More than One Site

Consider that once you have this hosted site, you can add more sites under it. On Host Rocket, and on other hosts, they are offering additional domain name slots. For instance, Host Rocket offers 8 additional slots. This means that you can purchase one host and then open up to 8 more websites on that same space. See how you could need more hard disk space than you thought? So the 25 gigabytes size is not unreasonable if you have plans for more than one site.

Customer Service

If you're new at this, look for a website host that offers good customer service. Dotster, for example (as of this writing), has 24/7 telephone customer service for your technical questions or problems. Some hosting companies have instant chat services, which let you "chat" with a technician in real time.

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