How To Host A Website

It's common knowledge that no matter how good your website is designed and how valuable its content may be, you'd still need to have a way for it to be accessible by anyone from the internet. This is where web hosting comes into the picture.

To give you aclearer idea, a website needs to actually be placed or "reside" on a computer somewhere that anyone using the World Wide Web can visit 24 hours a day. We call this computer a host computer and the associated service known commonly as web hosting.

Before I even go further on how to host a website, I am assuming that you already have the following things in place:

* Your own domain name

* Your own website pre-loaded with content (optional)

The second one is optional since some of you might still be starting out with your own site. Others however, prefer to secure a domain and build some content (e.g. text, images, videos) before figuring out the best way to make it available on the internet.

The word "hosting" is generally used to refer to a number of services that are required to support a website. For example, if you link a couple of computers at work or at home, then give it the ability to share drives and printers, you are then able to set up a mini network. Now expand that picture and imagine millions of computers around the world connected together and you've got the internet.

There are three ways for you to host your website.

You can do it by yourself and Host it On Your Own Server, but more likely you'll be baffled by a number of expenses (i.e.hardware, software and labor). You'd be needing some powerful hardware with a high-speed connection that will work 24/7. Server licenses are much higher than client licenses. Installations costs, maintaining your software and having to deal with the occasional bugs and viruses might just "bug" you down.

Another option is through an Internet Service Provider or ISP. Although no longer the best choice especially if you are planning to make money online with your site, ISPs provide hosting services aside from giving you standard internet connection. This normally includes a free email account as well. For beginners, this is a reasonable choice, but further along you would definitely want to shift to renting out a location for your website.

Web hosting services are the ones that often do it best, and there are thousands available to choose from. Some of them are free, but have limited features and webspace and in the long run, if you start running with most of these free services, you'd have less control than if you were to pay for one.

And it really won't cost you an arm or a leg as well, especially if you know how to monetize your site. Two excellent performing web hosting services that can give you unlimited bandwidth, high-speed connections and much more are HostGator.com and BlueHost.com. Their packages start at an affordable price of $7 and $5 per month, respectively.

HostGator and BlueHost boast not only of their hosting capabilities, but other superior benefits for their customers such as unlimited disk storage, unlimited domains, domain privacy, email support for different types, auto-responders, and many others. You can expect them to run your website live 24 hours a day and they provide round the clock customer service as well. With BlueHost, you can even get your domain name free for life, as long as you avail of their web hosting service.