The following pages will discuss how to evaluate and choose a shared hosting plan that is right for your particular needs.
For practical purposes, there are three options available to host your site:
1. Free Hosting…. This is not really a serious option, but we do need to mention it. Free hosting has serious limitations which make it a bad choice for anything beyond a hobby site. It will not work well for an e-commerce site, or for any type of site with which you hope to draw visitors. Free sites frequently show advertising banners, have limitations on data transfer, and do not allow your own domain name. A few, for a couple of bucks a month, will remove the banners. However, the same couple dollars a month can buy your own domain on a shared server with far less limitations.
2. Dedicated Hosting…..A dedicated hosting plan places your site on a web hosts dedicated server. This can be very fast, and will usually handle a great deal of data transfer. It's the right choice for large business that requires tens of thousands of pages and has hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. The downside to dedicated hosting is the cost, which can range $150 per month and up. For most sites it is overkill and an unnecessary expense.
3. Shared Hosting….The third option, shared hosting, is the choice for a majority of web sites. A great many sites both business and personal use this inexpensive option. With shared hosting your site is set up on one of your web hosts servers along with a number of other sites, and the resources as well as data transfer and storage on the server are shared. This works quite well for most websites. The cost can range from $5.00 a month up to as much as $75 a month, though we caution that more expensive does not always mean better. The majority of web hosting companies require a year or two payment in advance in order to obtain the best pricing.
Next Page - Planning for the features you reqire
How to Choose a Web Hosting Plan
Types of Web Hosting
Reliable and Affordable Web Hosting Companies