Affordable Web Site Hosting
There was a time not so long ago when hosting your web site was an expensive business, fortunately this is no longer the case. Depending on your requirements you should be able to find a hosting package that fits your budget however small it may be.If you have a web host ready and waiting for you to upload your pages to or if you want to jump straight in and design a free HTML web site then you might like to read the article Web Site Design - The Basics which takes you through the design and development of a simple web page template that you can use and modify to build your own web sites.
What you should look for in an affordable web site hosting package.
When you go looking for a hosting solution you should have a checklist of features that you would like at your new host. Some of the more important features to be considered are:
Space
How much computer disk space is your web site going to take up? Think about the kind of things that your are going to use your web site for and estimate the maximum amount of space that you are going to use. You might be surprised how little you actually do need when you do the calculations. If you aren't going to be using a lot of images or any audio or video files then a small hosting plan of 100 MB is enough for 50 - 100 web pages. My first web site started out with a small plan like this and that small site has never needed any more than that.
It is important that you make sure that you can upgrade your hosting plan by adding more disk space for reasonable cost if and when your site does outgrow your hosting plan.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the total amount of data that you and your visitors are allowed to transfer to and from the site in any month. Again, if you are starting with a small site then even the most modest of hosting packages will most likely be adequate for you.
If your web pages are an average length of 10KB and each web page has two 20KB images on them then each time a visitor views one of your pages a 50KB download would result. If your host allows you 1GB of bandwidth per month then that is equivalent to downloading 20,000 web pages in a month or 666 pages a day. If every visitor downloads two pages every visit then you can satisfy more than 300 visitors every day with 1GB per month bandwidth. That's a respectable number of visitors for a small site just starting out.
In fact the numbers are even better than that because the web browsers that your visitors use to view your pages with have a caching mechanism which saves any elements that are downloaded and tries to reuse them instead of downloading them every time they are needed. This is most useful when you reuse the same image on several pages, your visitor will only download that image once instead of every time it appears on a web page.
Again be sure that you are able to upgrade your hosting package for reasonable cost when your site starts to get a lot of visitors.
Operating System
In practice you only have two choices of operating system for your hosting, Linux and Windows. Linux has 80% of the web server market and generally is cheaper than an equivalent Windows platform. Linux servers tend to be more reliable and consistent than their Windows counterparts and many will tell you that it is technically superior in many ways including security.
It doesn't matter what operating system you run on your personal computer because you will be able to view and administer your web server no matter what operating system you run.
If you have an existing web site that uses Microsoft specific technologies like ASP and you want to move it to your new host then you might want to consider a Windows Server for your host. If this is not the case then don't. Unless you have a burning need to use a Windows web server then my advice is to go for a Linux server instead.
Cpanel
The user administration front end of almost all Linux based web hosts is an application called cpanel. This is now so familiar to webmasters that it's become almost a requirement. Please make no mistake when I say that using a Linux server with cpanel makes a terrific combination that is widely known and understood within the industry. Cpanel is supported by a lot of very affordable web site hosting packages. If you go this route then there will always be someone out there prepared to help you when you need it.
Scripting
PHP, PERL and SSI (Server Side Includes) are the main things to look out for. SSI is great for simplifying your themed pages when you don't want to be bothered with full blown scripting like PHP.
When you are looking for a script to add a feature to your web site you can almost guarantee that you will find a solution (often free) written in either PHP or PERL. Some very cheap web hosts do not provide these features so it's best to check.
Databases
Databases are the engines of the dynamic web sites that are becoming more and more popular these days. It isn't always easy to spot a database driven site but you can bet that there will be one behind every forum, blog, shopping cart and many other things. I would strongly suggest that you make sure that your affordable web site hosting offers databases with your package. Some hosts put a limit on how many you can have and some offer unlimited databases. A minimum of 50 available databases is perhaps a good number.
There are several good database solutions that I could talk about here but I think for the purposes of this discussion we can limit it to just one, MySQL. MySQL is an open source (free) database manager and is usually provided with every cpanel. Setting up and administering a MySQL database with cpanel is very simple and almost every script requiring a database that you will come across will support it. In fact many scripts rely on it exclusively.
MySQL databases are a must have feature.
Cron
Cron, from the word chronos, is a Linux application that allows you to schedule programs to run on the server at specific times. The ability to do this is important when you are using things like autoresponders that send messages to your subscribers at set intervals for instance.
Some web hosts don't allow the use of cron because you can potentially use it to schedule programs to run all of the time and cause the host to slow down and even crash because your programs are hogging the machine. It is very important that you make sure that you are able to use cron however because it is a very useful and sometimes indispensable feature.
All hosting solutions come with some kind of email accounts but it is best to check it out anyway. Some hosts will limit the number of email accounts that you can create but others allow unlimited accounts. Unless you have an organisation and you want to give everyone an account on this host then you may not need many. You do need a few though so it's best to check.
Add-on Domains
If you purchase more domains will you be able to add them to this host? Most hosts will allow add-on domains but some will limit the number of domains that you can add. Make sure that the host you choose fits your plans for domains.
Subdomains
Subdomains are essentially directories off of your main domain that can be accessed in a special way over the Internet. For example if you have a domain mydomain.com you would view your pages on the web by typing the URL http://www.mydomain.com. Lets say you create a subdomain called subby and add some pages to the directory that it creates. You now have the option of viewing those pages two ways. You can access the directory directly from your main domain by using the URL http://www.mydomain.com/subby or you can use the subdomain URL http://www.subby.mydomain.com
I'm not sure which format is best but it is important that you have the option to create subdomains so make sure that your host lets you.
Free hosting
This is an article on affordable web site hosting so how does free sound? I know it sounds incredible but it is true, there are hosting packages that cost you nothing at all.
So what's the catch? Well many of the free hosting solutions will force you to show adverts on every page of your web site that are nothing to do with your topic. I don't like these much because they make your web site look bad. Most of the free sites in this category will provide only a very small number of features, small space allowances for pages and low bandwidth limits.
You might manage to find a web host that provides a zero cost starter solution, which will be identical to their paid solutions but providing less features. This is better than having a web site with someone else's adverts on it and you know that the host is making money from everyone who outgrows their free starter package and upgrades.
Beware: A long time ago I decided to use a free host for a web site that I was starting. Everything was great for a while; just long enough for me to build the site up to a nice size then one day it simply wasn't there anymore. Now I was able to take the backup that I kept of my site and install it on a new host but it took me several days before I was back to a running situation again. I for one will not use a free host again for any serious site.
If you want to look for free hosting then you might want to start by looking at the list at free-webhosts.com.
Affordable Web Site Hosting
Yes there is a lot of good cheap hosting available for under $10 a month or even under $5 a month. In fact I can show you a host that has proven to be highly reliable over the last two years and has a starter package for only $25 a year. Ok you only get 100MB of space and low bandwidth but it's enough to run a small web site and you can upgrade at any time you feel the need for more capacity. This host is called doorhost.net.
When you get to the doorhost home page scroll down to the bottom and click the link Entry Level Hosting. They don't advertise it with their main packages.
There are a number of places you can go to find comparative lists of affordable web site hosting. You can make a start by looking at hostsearch.com or findmyhosting.com.