hosting

1. by Jennifer Bailey
Bit Of Background – Web Hosting
Once you have chosen a name (or domain) you now need to choose someone to
host your website, this will be a hosting company (or web host).
What does a hosting company/ web host do?
The web host is the company that houses your site (think of it a garage and your
website is the car) and provides you with space for your web pages, email
addresses, forums, social networking, shopping carts and more. Every website has
to have a hosting company because a website does not exist without one (even free
websites have a web host – you just don’t pay for it!)
How do I choose a good one?
When you purchase your domain name, you will also be offered the option of
purchasing hosting. It is not essential that you buy your hosting and your domain
name from the same company but it can make it easier (but make sure that the
package that you are planning to buy meets all your current requirements).
Things to look for:
Basics
Does it fulfil the minimum requirements for WordPress?
PHP v 5.24 or greater (The language that WP is written in)
MySQL v5.0 or greater (Databases)
Other Features
Does it use a Control Panel such as CPanel? (not essential but strongly
recommended)
Does it have enough storage to meet your requirements? (To store all your files)
Does it have enough Bandwidth? (The transfer of info from your website to your
visitor)
FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
Email - Does it provide you with mailboxes? How many? Are there enough for your
needs?
Free Domain Name Registration
Does it offer good customer support – is it available 24/7? (Not to be
underestimated!)

2. by Jennifer Bailey
Other Considerations
Does it have good reviews?
Is it a competitive
price?
I generally buy my domains from GoDaddy, 123 Reg or Namecheap (as I
mentioned in the previous section) yet host my websites with Hostgator.com. The
reason for this is they provide plans where you can host unlimited domains (so more
than one website) plus they use CPanel which makes organising your domains,
subdomains and emails easier. It is also a breeze to install Wordpress (which we will
discuss more in the next section).
Some web hosts limit the number of domains that you can have. For example you
may want one website but different domain names to point to it. Say your business
specialised in kitchen and bathroom design – you may wish to use two different
domain names – one for the kitchen part and one for the bathrooms. You may wish
to host multiple sites, say one for your business or one for your hobby. Buying a
hosting account which only allows one domain or one website can be quite limiting.
Note: If you buy your hosting package and domain names from a different provider
then you will need to change the nameservers of your domain names. Check out my
section on ‘Changing Nameservers’ for more details. It can take 24-48 hours for the
nameserver change to take effect so if you are in a hurry then you should register
your domain with your chosen web host.
Hosting packages vary in cost, often it depends on the package that they are
offering. With Hostgator you can expect to pay around £5 ($8) per month for the
‘Baby Plan’.
Find out more about Hostgator here

3. by Jennifer Bailey
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