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It is probably best to put your first site with a free service, such as that offered by homepage.com or the other free services that I mentioned. Whether you are an individual or a business, it makes sense to establish a website and a presence on the web before you invest too much money. However, once your site is actually finished, and ready for some real action, especially if you are a business, you will want to get a pay service.
What are the benefits of a pay service? Well, first you get rid of the annoying banner ads. Second, you can have your own domain name. So instead of http://yourname.homepage.com, your address would be http://www.yourname.com. Also, and this is especially nice if you are a business, you will get some POP3 email accounts with your site. That way, your employees can have email addresses (or addresses for different departments). Another benefit is that you can use web applications. If you are a person, that hardly matters (unless you want to display your web programming skills, which is my purpose). If you are a business, you will appreciate having an application that can take online orders and interface directly with your inventory database. Also, many companies that offer web hosting offer programs that will do these things, and also offer (at an extra cost) to program anything proprietary that you may need.
Now that you want your own web-hosting service, where do you go? There are two main types of web hosting services: virtual servers and dedicated servers. A dedicated server is a whole computer completely dedicated to your website. Unless you are planning on getting hundreds of thousands of hits a day, you can make do with a virtual server. A virtual server is a server that is divided up into chunks, each of which acts like a separate server. They are also available for very reasonable prices.
There are many different companies offering virtual servers. When I did a search of the internet, I found a few that seemed to offer the best prices. Beware, though: I have no personal experience with these companies, other than Website Factory. The companies are websitefactory.net, hosting2000.com, and invite.net. Website Factory seems to be okay, although they are oftentimes unhelpful and their help pages are uninformative.
Now that you have a place to put your site, you need a domain name. What is a domain name? That is the URL, or location, of your site. My domain name is http://www.mikegoode.com. Why is this important? Because having an impressive domain name gives the appearence of size. Would you be more willing to trust a company that had an address like http://mikegoode.homepage.com/ or one that had an address like http://www.mikegoode.com? Having your own domain name is not very expensive and it is impressive.
So how do you get a domain name? You could register it with the InterNIC, the official name registration service for the United States, or you could just have your website host do the dirty work for you. Most of them are partners of the InterNIC, and can register a name on your behalf.
So, how much does it cost? Not much, really. Domain name registration is only $35 (US) per year. Hosting, for a basic site with not too much space, can be as little as $10 a month or even less, or, conversely, much higher, depending on your needs.
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