Best Web Hosting For Beginners (Markys Robertson)
Feb 11, 2010
In order to choose the best web hosting for beginners, we identified several factors for you to first consider about your website. Some of the factors considered in Part 1 of this article were website complexity, the type of content it is going to contain, and your level of technical expertise in setting it up and getting it online. In this example, you want to get off to a quick start, so you're just going to publish a basic personal website. (We're also assuming that you've already registered your new website's domain name with GoDaddy.com or some other Internet registrar.)
As we're talking about this being a basic website, we've also come to understand that all the easy web hosting for beginners packages come with enough tools and resources to meet your basic requirements. All packages include an easy-to-use website design program (usually driven by automated templates), quite a few email accounts, and a file manager program to help you manage your website's files on your server. Many hosting companies are also standardizing around offering unlimited disk storage space and unlimited network traffic as part of their basic packages. (You can always upgrade or purchase more later if needed.)
Now that you have identified your website's basic requirements, it's time to consider several more issues. The first one will be how long do you plan on keeping your website up and online. The best web hosting for beginners providers all offer monthly plans, and all also offer discounts on annual or multi-year hosting plans. I'd suggest hosting your site for at least a year, so not only do you give it time to become established on the web, but it also allows you to take advantage of any annual discounts.
Credit cards are typically the way you pay for your hosting account. Your hosting company usually keeps your credit card number in their database to facilitate auto-renewals of your hosting account; most all send periodic renewal notices prior to your plan's expiration. Since you don't want your website to disappear from the internet, I'd strongly suggest having your account set up this way. You won't run the risk, then, of having your hosting account suspended due to your forgetting to renew it.
The reliability of your hosting company and network should be important to you too, so you'll want to surf some of their sites and do a little research. Here are a few things to look for when comparing the best web hosting for beginners providers:
- Take a look at your prospective hosting plan and see if you can tell what kind of hardware your website will be hosted upon. If it's not a brand name like Compaq, Dell, HP, or Sun, it'll probably be a cheaper, less-reliable "white box" server.
- As you're a beginner to website hosting, see if your potential hosting company offers toll-free technical support by phone in your hosting plan. Chat and email are adequate, but you may want a higher degree of support available.
- One IP address is typically shared among the more inexpensive hosting accounts all located on the same server. If any of these "neighbors" of yours engage in disreputable behavior like spamming, that IP may be blocked. This effectively can make your own website inaccessible to others. If that happens, get your own IP address for your website; it's typically only a couple dollars per month extra.
If you can remember most of these tips as you're shopping for the best hosting provider for beginners, you'll end up with a good selection that you can be happy with. Pricing between hosting companies can be pretty aggressive, so you should also be able to save some money too. Enjoy the learning experience, and before long you, too, will be joining millions of other people on the World Wide Web.
About the AuthorWith 15 years of technical experience, author Markys Robertson writes extensively about website design, cheap web hosting for beginners, domain names, and other Internet related topics. If you're seeking the best web hosting for beginners, click here now to see some of Markys' favorite providers..