Hosting your files

What are people going to see when they look at my website?

After going through the registrar and company that is doing your DNS (usually your registrar or hosting company) people can now reach your website! There's one problem though. We don't have any files uploaded!

To solve this we will need a company to "host" our website. Hosting companies will pay for all of the overhead charges that come with running a website, and only charge you a fraction of the cost to store your files and provide bandwidth for your site.

Choosing the correct hosting company

There are many companies that will host your website, and at first glance you'd think they are all the same right? Well they all will display your files, but here are some other factors to consider when choosing a hosting company:

1) Price
2) Features
3) Support


Price is the usually the most important to most people to looking to start a web page, but when choosing a lower priced hosting company like GoDaddy you will most likely get less features and worse support.

Some features may include server side support for such programming languages as PHP, ASP and FrontPage extensions, or the ability to use Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) to upload or download your files. Also when many people start their first website they do not know how to use an FTP client to upload and download the files for their website. Some companies support staff with take time and teach you how to use these programs, but these are usually some of the more expensive companies.

Deciding on which hosting company lies in large part on your needs, but with the server side support for PHP, ASP and FrontPage what does that mean? How do I know if I need those? Well, these are programming languages that are used for creating websites that need add-ons on the server. This is determined by which language you or your website developer decided to use to create your website.

What? You say you haven't created any web pages yet? Well, good for you our blog next week is about website developement! Check back next Friday for the next post!

By Justin and Casey