An Experiment of a Webmaster

For someone that does not have experience getting a hosting account, this can be a daunting step. People expect to see things a little pricey and are afraid to even look because they think a fairly large investment will be involved. When they find out that you can get a quality web site for under $10 a month the natural fear of being taken for a ride kicks in. It just seems like you can’t possibly get a good deal for that price, so they gravitate towards the expensive for no reason hosts.

Luckily any of us who’ve been around for a while know this isn’t the case. You can easily get an entire year of hosting for under $100, rather than the one month people expect. Cheap web hosting is not a bad option either. The cheaper web hosts used to have poor customer service or features to make up for this, but now they have full blown service any business would love.

I’m going to start by suggesting a few cheap web hosts before I begin actually talking about what features you need from them so you can look at their features lists as we go. Some hosts I recommend:

• Finally, for those who need a name brand, is Yahoo Small Business

Personally from this list I like Hostgator, which is why I listed it #1. They have all of the features, and you can tell from reading their plan comparisons that they know how to help an online business. If I’m not mistaken they even have credits for search engine advertising.

I threw Yahoo onto the list too since many people starting out for the first time want the comfort that comes with a name brand. They didn’t used to be a very cheap web host, since their plans were tailored to the less computer savvy, but now they include plans nearly as cheap as some of the others listed above. No sub-5$ a month plans like the niche hosts, but still sub-10$. They also have ecommerce packages for those that don’t want to mess with software setup themselves to get a product online.

What to look for in a host

Now to start up a web site with as little effort as possible there are a few stardard features that you’re going to want to make sure your host has.

The first is PHP. Most up to date web hosts offer php hosting. PHP is a programming language designed for the web and is very powerful. Besides the power of it, one of the major reasons its become nearly “the standard” is that its an open source language. Its free for your host to install, or you to install if you decide to run your own servers. Most linux web servers come with this installed automaticly. Why do you really care? Well, you care because the popularity means a lot of premade scripts are already available for you, so you can do pretty nice things without any programming knowledge. You usually just need the ability to place the files where they need to go and you’re done.

Another critical feature is MySql. Once again, most up to date web hosts support mysql hosting or another form of database hosting. MySql is also a free application. Its also rock solid and has a huge chunk of the database market. May large web outfits such as the Yahoo Search use mysql as their database. As a powerful free app, may of the PHP scripts you’ll be using use Mysql as their backend.

You’re witnessing the power of these 2 applications right now. This blog is written in php and the data is stored in a mysql database. Setup on it took about 5 minutes from start to finish. All you have to do to get a blog like this running is get an account from above (or another php/mysql host), create a database using the hosts control panel, upload files using that control panel, and access your website. It will configure through the web from that moment on. All you had to do was put it into place and point it at your database, after that it takes over. In future tutorials I’ll go into more depth with wordpress and a few other key scripts you’ll want to have to start getting a profession presentation up and running as soon as possible with little maintenance required.

Continute on to Part 2 of our tutorial series: Getting a cheap domain name and setting it up quickly.