A hosting company is a place that
provides a place for you to host your website. It is a big computer server in a
room somewhere. There are many different hosting services, but the two that I
use and have found to be reliable, easy to use and have great help are
Sitebuildit! and
EZ Web Hosting. (There are literally thousands of hosting companies out
there. I am sure there are some other good ones, but these are the ones I have
used the most.)
Choosing a host has more to do with how
involved you want to get with the website programming. If you are fairly
comfortable with a computer and software, have time to set aside to do things
like submit your pages to all of the search engines, learn to use an web site
editing program such as Front Page or Coffee Cup, you can set up your own
website using the
EZ Web Hosting system which is a little less expensive up front. The also
have a template system that you can use and you don’t need an html editor or
don’t need to know any technical aspects. The Sitebuildit! System is for anyone
to use and actually is much more efficient in getting traffic to your website.
Any host will really do as long if you
are willing to take the time to learn how to optimize your pages and track the
results. It also depends on if you have the time to learn about html, html
editors and have time to submit your pages to search engines and track the
results. SBI does it all for you – or at least will tell you what you need to
do to make things happen.
I first started out using something
called Netscape composer that came with Netscape Navigator. It isn’t available
anymore but you can download a newer version in the
Mozilla Suite for free. Html editors and text editors are computer programs
that create websites. There are some very simple ones out there that you can
purchase for a reasonable fee or even get for free. There is a list of text
and html editors in the resources section at the end.
If you are having a hard time deciding
on which hosting package you want to purchase there is a really neat decision
making tool called
Chooseit! to help you and also a
hosting comparison page.
