WEB HOSTING AND DOMAIN HOSTING INFO

The Quick and Easy Guide to Choosing a Web Host

With thousands of website hosts out there, it can often be hard to choose the one that will work best for you. With a little bit of work, however, you can pick out the perfect host.

Focus on Your Needs
What is your website going to do? Do you need a lot of storage space and bandwidth? Or can you get by with just a little? Do you need email addresses @yourdomain.com? Or are you going to use a Yahoo! Mail account (or similar)? What about databases, and spam filters, and website builders

Low Cost Web Hosting

If you are an individual who wants to show off your interests, special qualities, hobbies, e.t.c. to your friends or anybody outside; then it is the best idea to go for a low cost web hosting or even a free web hosting.

Even for small businesses, low cost web hosting would be the best option to get the maximum exposure for their company, their products and their services. As we all know web hosting is the must for any type of business whether it is small or big. But putting in huge amounts in web hosting for smaller or start up companies is not viable in the most cases and hence cheap web hosting is the great solution for this problem.

Choosing a Free Web Host for Your Business

You are running a business. Perhaps you want to test the waters before shelling out large sums of money to set up your commercial web-site. Or perhaps you simply want to save as much money as possible. Whatever the reason, you have probably at some stage seriously considered using a free web host. If so, then you this overview may go at least some of the way in helping you make your choice.*

All of the hosts surveyed below offer virtual domain hosting, email, and (approx) 20-40mb storage space, along with some version of online forms processing ability (eg through Frontpage extensions or cgi-scripts). Most require banner advertising be placed on users' web-sites, though they do also allow users to upgrade to banner-free hosting for a fee.

These, then, are the commonalties. Now to the differences. What sets these hosts apart, and why would you choose one over the other?

It really depends on your priorities….

If you are seeking support and the opportunity to network with others, your first choices would probably be hypermart.net or bizland.com

Hypermart.net is an "all rounder" [www.hypermart.net], which offers a very full range of site hosting features., including cgi and Frontpage support. It also has a wide range of free support facilities and web-tools.

Bizland.com [www.bizland.com], like hypermart.net, bills itself as a community as well as a web-host. Bizland also provides a free shopping cart.

If you hold a foreign (non-US) domain, then Netfirms (www.netfirms.com) should probably be your first point of call. Netfirms can host any country specific domain name.

If your priority is to set up an online shopping cart and merchant account, then look closely at freemerchant.com [www.freemerchant.com] , which specialises in providing shopping carts for small business merchants. Freemerchant.com also allows users to attach free shopping cart functionality to their existing web-sites. It does not require banner ads -- a big plus. On the other hand, the reliance on templates for developing sites can limit the ability to customise the design of one's site

All of the hosts we have mentioned so far are Unix-based. If you, on the other hand, prefer working in a Windows environment, then atfreeweb.com [www.atfreeweb.com] is seriously worth considering. Notable features include support of Active Server Pages and Frontpage extensions.