Step 2 – Choose a web host

Once you have secured your domain name, you will need to choose a good and reliable hosting company. Good doesn’t always mean expensive. Good means reliable with great support.

Be careful of free hosting companies. They usually have hosting packaged with other offers or products and usually don’t do the best job at hosting. Some companies even bundle domain registration with hosting which confuses some folks because they are actually two different services.

So what is hosting anyway?

Hosting companies store the website you create on their servers and transmits it to the internet so that when someone types in the domain your registered, your web site appears. A server is just a fancy computer that “serves up” your web site to the internet. It’s like the renting an apartment in an apartment building; when you rent the space, they give you an apartment number. When you want visitors, you give them your address. If you lived in an apartment, you would also need to provide the building and apartment number. And if that analogy didn’t work for you, don’t worry. Hosing companies usually make it easy to sign up.

Here what you should know when you are looking for a hosting company.

DO NOT start out with most expensive plan. Most people are driven to buying the more expensive plans because they led to believe lots of space and storage. The smallest plans are usually good enough to start. Any plan offering 10 mb is plenty for most first web sites. If you want to be sure, then choose a plan around 50 – 100 mb. Anything over 50 mb is a HUGE amount of space. If you get at least that, you will be fine.

Again, go to Google and search the term “hosting companies” and you will see plenty choices. I use a company called Host Gator and strongly recommend them. http://www.webstrategies101.com/HostGator. There are lots of hosting companies out there so make sure you choose one with good customer services and can answer your technical questions and you are moving along at creating your site.