Web Design

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or most individuals and even small businesses, the cost of setting up, securing, and maintaining

their own Web server is both technically and cost prohibitive. You can easily avoid these issues

by using a third-party Web host. Web hosts provide the server space, security, and maintenance

expertise to allow you to focus on the design and content of your site. You must find a host, sign up

for their service, and transfer your site’s files to their servers in order to get online.

Find a Web Host ...................................................

Shopping for a Host

There are literally millions of Web hosts available — a Google

search for “Web hosting” in June 2010 returned 89 million

results. Therefore, you should spend some time comparison

shopping. Hosts have widely varying fees for their services,

from free to thousands of dollars per month. They also offer a

wide range of services for these fees, so you must investigate

which ones offer the services you want for the price you

can afford.

Services offered

Cost

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Domain Hosting
Free Web hosts generally require that you use their domain name, but most other hosts offer domain
hosting, where you can purchase a domain name and use it for your site. Some hosts even offer multiple
domain hosting, allowing you to purchase several domains and host them all, either as a single site that has
many domains pointing to it, or as separate sites.
Shared versus Dedicated Hosting
Many Web hosts offer two basic services: shared hosting and
dedicated hosting. With shared hosts, your site is on a server
with many other sites. If one or more of those sites begins to use
too much bandwidth or server resources, the performance of your
site might suffer. Dedicated hosting allows you to rent an entire
server for your site, so yours is the only one running on the
machine. This is, for obvious reasons, a much more expensive
alternative, but generally offers better performance.
SharedShared
DedicatedDedicated