Ecommerce Web Hosting that is Affordable Web Site Hosting Web Site Hosting How To.

The best web site hosting could be ecommerce web site hosting or free web site hosting what ever your needs are require that you understand the important facts concerning hosting for you to make an informed decision. Web site hosting can be cheap or run you into the thousands if you don't know the market. there are many internet web site hosting services, most of them swinging the bull. What you need is a affordable web site hosting plan, should you go with "Unix web site hosting" or Windows. the are big problems that you will run into later if you choose wrong. Learn the facts here at Hosting-news.com

Home

Learn about the Server your Hosting With.

Domain Name
Registration
and
Settings

Domain Name

Web Hosting

Disk Space

E-mail accounts

Bandwidth

Unmetered traffic

FTP

Control Panel

Database

CGI-Scripts

Perl and PHP

FrontPage

Link Exchange

Exchange Links

Top Hosting News Stories

Parsons Domains offers the lowest priced Domain Names on the Internet. Along with the best Hosting plans one could offer. Parsons Domains is your one stop shopping store on Internet when it comes to the Webmaster's needs. There are over a hundred products sold at Parsons Domains, to help the webmaster in his needs concerning his Web Sites. Here is a list of webmaster products sold at Parsons Domains.

From affordable Hosting to the lowest priced Domain Names, is where you'll find them. All products come with free extras and total control, Control Panels. From Hosting to your Domain Names, changes can be made on the fly. No need to whate to contact support and for them to respond. Ofcourse if your having problems, you are able to get help 24/7 from the best and free support team on the Web. Support will have your problem solved, most of the time, with in an hour.

So if your just starting out as a webmaster, or you have been a webmaster from the begining of the World Wide Web Parsons Domains is the place to shop for all your Webmaster Needs.

This Company also has other Domain's leading to it's parent company's site which is they are which is a great page listing many turms that discribe how people ask for great hosting and domain name registration and Hosting. Also which leads you to a page for directly checking your Domain Name and ordering Hosting. is also the place to go for all your hosting needs.

Hosting Companies

Web Hosting your Web Site on the world Wide Web has become very easy. Most Web site Hosting companies have installed software now that allows you to do everything online with in minutes. For as little as $3.95 a month you can have a professional looking site ready for action.

There are a few things you need to know before you go looking for hosting. Although Web Hosting is not that expensive these days you do need to know what you plan to do before you spend $4.00 to $30.00 on something that's not going to sever your needs. And some places charge a setup fee and that would be wasted.

Lets start by asking what is involved in web site hosting a web site. First you need a connection to the Internet. To do that you go through an ISP ( Internet Service Provider ). Why because connecting to the internet backbones or super highways as they're called costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars. So Companies pay the big bucks to connect and then sell little connections to you, they are called ISP's. There are ISP"S that give you just a connection to the Internet and there are those that give you a whole range of services. Connections like AOL allow you to enter a whole world unto it self. It's like a tole booth on the highway that just charges you a quarter to continue down the road, and a tole booth that charges more then makes you pass through their mall. They not only charge you more but most of you will end up buying other services from them also. But that lonely tole booth that only charges you a quarter is so plane and simple. You just get the Internet.

Now anyone connecting to these big back bones pay for big chunks of Bandwidth. When you pay to connect to the internet these companies already know you are not going to be passing too much data. You have only one or at least just a few computers and most of the time you are going to be reading or listening to the data your down loading.

But now you want to start hosting your own web site on your computer. Just about all of your ISP's will not allow this!!! Why? Your passing data back and forth all day now what's the difference. The difference is that once you start hosting your web site, now the data can come and go as fast as your computer can dish it out. You might be sleeping and your computer could be talking to a million visitors, that can't waite to see what you have to offer.

Your ISP is only charging you ten to twenty a month because, you alone, most likely won't be passing that much data.. You are only allowed so much passing of data. This passing of data is called Bandwidth. When you connect to the internet you are only using very little bandwidth. You down load a page and with in seconds the connection to the internet is cut. It looks to you as if you are still connected but as soon as the page is finished downloading the connection is cut. You download another page, the connection is opened and then cut again. The page your looking at is in your computer the connection to the internet doesn't need to be open anymore.

Now when your hosting your web page the world is connecting to your computer. Before it was just you using the connection, now the world is using the connection. Big difference!

So what do you do? It's just too costly to pay for a direct connection to one of those back bones. Well this is where Hosting Companies come in. These companies have in place all the means to host your Web Site. And you can get some great deals out there now. But What's a great deal? Read on.

What is involved in Web Hosting a Web Site.

What a web site hosting company does is first get a T1 or T3 connection to the internet back bones. T1 and T3 are terms used to describe high bandwidth connections. They pay for large chunks of bandwidth. then they get a bunch of special computers call servers. Servers are pretty mush the same as regular pc's except they are used for serving files to remote computers. When you host a Web Site, what you will be doing is, on your computer you will creating a web page, which is a file in a format (http) that can be used by browsers like your Internet Explorer. You will then upload this file onto a hard drive in one of the servers at the hosting company.

There are programs like Apache, who's purpose is for Web Hosting, that will be running on these servers. These programs are setup so as to give you your own little space on this hard drive. You will then register a domain name. This Domain Name will identify your Web Site's address. You get to choose this name, but only one person can own a particular domain name at any given time. That's why Bank of America paid $3,000,000 for loans.com. They are the only one's that can use that name. Shop around for a domain registrar because prices vary greatly. A .com name should cost around $10.00 or less these days.

Sounds easy and it is, I will now go into detail describing each step of the way.

Setting up your first Web Site Step by Step.

Domain Name Registering

The first thing you have to do is register a domain name. The domain name is going to be the address of your web site. It is also how people are going to call your site. So you will want to take your time when choosing this name. you may not be able to get the one you want because there can be only one owner to any particular domain name. For example if you are planning to start a lending institution and your trying to get the name "loans.com" well your too late because Bank of America has that one. They paid three million dollars for it from the person that had it before. That doesn't mean that your going to have to come up with that kind of money, your just going to have to be a bit more creative when choosing a name. A new domain name that hasn't been chosen before cost about ten dollars to register, that's per year.

You register domain names at web sites called registrars. A list of registrars can be found at www.internic.net. Check around, prices for registering a domain name very wildly. And it's very important that you register your name at a site that has easy access to the settings and easy to renew. I had a great name once and lost it because the place I registered at, closed up shop and before I could find out how to renew it it was taken.

Hosting Your Site

Next step is, finding a hosting company. But first you'll have to figure out what you will be using your web site for. If your just starting, you can get by with one of the basic plans being offered on the net. But there are things you'll need to know.

Lets go into a little more detail about what's involved in hosting a web site.

Things you'll need;

• Sufficient amount of disk space on the Hosting Company's computer to hold your web site. 1 to 10 pages -- 500 megs easy.
• Sufficient amount of bandwidth for the visitors going to your site and/or download thing you have to offer. -- 25 gigs on basic plan offered at some hosting companies. If your just starting out and don't have too many photos 25 gigs is more than enough.
• Hosting that allows cgi programs so you can run data bases and other things like chat, forums, shopping carts etc.. -- Most basic plans offer at least PHP. You will need this to run Forums and other programs used to make your site more dynamic.
• Hosting that gives you a control panel so you can make changes to your site on a whim. So you can set up email accounts and data bases in the middle of the night if you want.
• Offers email accounts.
• Allows for up grading your plan if you out grow the plane your on now.
• Doesn't charge a setup fee. This is hard to find but the 're out there.

How much of all of this your going to need depends on how big you plan to make your site. But if your just starting out, the basic plane should be good for a while. Then just upgrade as needed.

If your only getting one or two visitors a week you really don't need more then the basic plan. Remember your Web Site is like a blade of grass in a gulf course. It's not like years ago when every one got millions of hits a day. You have to work hard at marketing your site just to get a few hits a day.

Here are the terms you'll need to know:

• Disk Space: This is your space on the Hosting company's hard drive to upload your site. When starting out 5oo megs is a good starting point. When I first started out I always got and paid too much for what I needed. Most Hosting Companies will let you up grade to a larger plane is you need to.
• POP/Webmail E-mail accounts: Most hosting companies will offer you a number of POP/Webmail E-mail accounts. These are accounts you can set up for your customers to email you. For example, you are hosting you mysite.com Domain Name, and you are offered 10 POP/Webmail E-mail Accounts, that means that you can have 20 different email address. But they all have to use your Domain mysite.com. billing@mysite.com or customer service@mysite.com up to the number of accounts you are offered. You set them up in your Control Panel.
• Bandwidth: The amount of data that can be downloaded from your site or account from the internet. All data leaving the servers to fulfill requests made through the internet for your web site is your bandwidth. For most Hosting Companies Uploads (FTP) do not count. This is important to keep an eye on. This is where you can incur great costs if your site ends up getting a lot of traffic and you have a site with a lot of photos and/or movies because these type of files contain a lot of data.
• Un metered traffic: Don't confuse this with Bandwidth, This is how many people are going to your site. Also and most of the time called Hits. Most people starting out think that un metered traffic mean unlimited bandwidth. BUT ITS NOT. Let me give you an example, your site just has the words "Hi There", Well this is no bandwidth at all. Probably a million people could go to your site and not even a meg of bandwidth would be used, but you would have a million Hits. If you had a limit on your traffic your site might of been stopped. The truth is that today no one puts a limit on traffic anymore. So when you here unlimited traffic, it's no biggy. Your main concern is Bandwidth. You might see this being offered "We do not count and limit the amount of traffic/hits your site can accept per month. Some providers limit hits, such as no more than 20,000 per month for example. This is not done. ". If you don't get un metered traffic don't use their service.
• FTP & Shell, 24x7access: This means that you can upload your files to your site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Most hosting companies offer this, if they don't go somewhere else. FTP is the protocol used for file transfer, http is used for transferring file to be shown on a Web Browser. Like when you type in a Domain Name into the Browser, you first type http://www.mysite.com.. This information will first go to a Name Server on the Internet, there it will get the address of mysite.com which will send it to your Hosting Company, at your Hosting Company their name servers will send it to the Web Server where your site is located. When you upload your files you will upload them via FTP, File Transfer Protocol, ftp://mysite.com. Once it gets to the Hosting Company, they will send it to their FTP Servers Where your Site is located.
• Control Panel: Years ago Hosting Companies did everything by hand. If you wanted to start using some of the features that they were offering you had to contact them and have them start the process. This took a lot of time. Now most Hosting Companies have software the does it all for you in an instance. You just log onto your Control Panel and click this and that and its done. If they don't offer a Control Panel don't use them. But just about all do if there still in business.
• Database Features: Your going to need a data base. If your Operating System your Hosting Company is using is Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, One of the most popular high performances open sources operating systems available, is most likely what their using. Then the database system you want is Mysql. Why does this matter? Most of the Free and great forum and content management programs being offered on the Internet require Mysql and PHP to run. These programs may be free but most of your Big Boys use them because you can't buy better programs. So if your Server running on Red Hat or Linux you will need these features. If your Hosting Company doesn't offer for free at least one Mysql Database and PHP don't go with them because you'll find, once you know what your doing you'll need these features.
• CGI-Scripts Features: Another must. You will need CGI "Common Gate Interface" access. Unless you only want to have a Web Page that just give plane information you are going to need CGI access. What this does is allow you to use or write scripts (small programs) to run them on the server side. These scripts will do things like connect your sites information to a database, or count your hits and post them on your Web Page, there are endless things you can do with server site scripts but they all require CGI access. Years ago many Hosting Companies didn't allow CGI access because you could write scripts to take control of or mess up the server. But with better security this is not a problem it was before and most Hosting Companies allow CGI access. So don't except Hosting with out it.
• Perl and PHP: These are programming languages called interpreters. These are run on the server hosting your site which allows you to write scripts and programs and put them in you Web Page and the server will run them. Although Perl was used almost exclusively in the past, PHP is becoming the language of choice because its so easy to program with. Perl was developed by programmers for programmers, very non programmer unfriendly. PHP is a lot more intuitive. More and more Web Site are being written entirely using PHP. These are data driven Pages. What this means is where before you had to write a page for every page of information you wanted, you now write only one page and simply change the information on the page. This allows for faster and larger development of Web Sites. How it works is you write only one page and PHP keeps tract of the information You want on the page via a data base. Say you have a base ball site and you want to offer information on each base ball player. You could store each players information on a data base and instead of writing a Web Page for each player you simply change the information on the page depending on which player your showing.
• Front Page 2003 & Earlier Extensions: Front Page is a Microsoft program that allows you to build web sites as easily as making a word document. It also features a 1 step upload and update feature know as publishing. In order for this to work, special codes must be already available in your hosting account, Known as Server Extensions. If you’re using Front Page 97, or 98, these will also work. See http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/ for more information.

Just starting out, a basic plan will do just fine.

Written by G. Parsons copyright © 2005 hosting-news.com