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A hosting company will grant you a certain amount of webspace on their server so that you may upload your website to the internet. A good place for beginners to start with is a free host. We reccomend doing a search for Free Hosts. We must stress however that free hosts in general aren't that good - they usually place a large banner on your site to advertise their services or some affiliate network. Hosting accounts are now so cheap that its really only beneficial for teenagers who cant get access to a credit card to pay for hosting.
There are two main ways to get your site online. One is to use a hosting companies online file manager, the other way which is by far the better way to upload your site, is to upload your site via FTP. A list of free FTP software can be found at Download.com.
Basic Hosting Terms
Here is a list of the main hosting terminology you will find when looking at hosting sites.
- Setup Fee - Some hosting companies charge for setting up your account. This is only usually applicable to large hosting contracts - eg. $100.00 per month+.
- Monthly/Quarterly/Yearly Payment - Hosting companies usuaully charge a little less if you pay more than a month at the one time.
- Disk Storage/Web Space - This is the amount of webspace you are allowed to host your site. Your actual website files (eg. HTML, PHP etc) will not take up much webspace but graphics can quickly eat into your hosting allowance.
- Bandwidth Allowance - This is the allowance of data transfer you are allowed. A simple description for bandwidth, is the resources a site uses on the computer who's server their site is housed on. Each time a file like a page, image, animation or midi etc. is loaded from a site, it is using a certain amount of resources or bandwidth from the computer it is on.
- No POP3 Accounts - The number of email accounts your host allows.
- Environment - A host will usually list the current version of software which it has installed. Examples are Perl, MYSQL and PHP.
- Server Details - Details of the server your account will be hosted on is usually stated.
In our next section we will give advice on how to find your ideal host!
| Section 2 : Choosing the right host |
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