How to Host Your Own Website

Now, it’s not as daunting as it seems – I remember when I signed up for my first hosting account back in 2000, it was exhilarating and exciting to have the power and control. Nowadays, the accounts come beefed up with all kinds of extras, features and tutorials too if you are stuck. You can achieve anything with hosting, run a full eCommerce website with no restrictions, photo album site, multimedia video site or a blog, such as this one, on WordPress. Whatever you want, it’s all possible.

Now first things first. You want a website, and therefore good web hosting. But before you can do that, you should invest in some internet real estate, i.e. a domain name which people will type into their browser to get to your website which you will host with a hosting company. Your domain name will be set up to point to your website hosting space, and can be done separately or at the same time as getting your website account.

The way it works is you sign up for a web hosting account on shared hosting. What this means is that somewhere, where the data center is located, there is a server with a certain amount of space where various shared hosting accounts are created. A typical hosting company will allow a limited number of shared hosting accounts per server, each with their own CPU resources, disk space, memory etc. i.e. more than enough for 99% of websites out there.

So who do you sign up with, and which company is reliable? Personally, I have been with many webhosts in the last 8 years, most of them in the first 4 years. I have made my fair share of mistakes and have reasons why I have moved around and migrated my websites from one host to another. Mostly, the considerations have been about:

1) Functionality
2) Features
3) Cost

For the past 4 years, going on 5 I have been with one host only, HostGator. I can say without a doubt that they are the Best bang for your buck, plus the best feature set and processing power for your website. I run everything with HostGator and have been more than impressed, especially with their customer support which is 24/7, and has a link on their site going to a live interface with support staff to ask any question you want if you are stuck.

The great thing about the Cpanel configuration is that you have Fantastico Included which gives you a whole lot of excellent applications which you can install with the click of a button, from blogs, content management systems, calendars, customer service applications, website builders etc. etc. etc. a lot of cool apps.

Let me know if you have any questions regarding HostGator and my experience with them, and I will be happy to answer where I can, and share what I know.