Saturday, August 27, 2011

Hosting Your Personal Website

By Gregory Trune


It can be hard to design a website and it requires a lot of work and creativity to do a good job. Of course, your job is not complete after designing it; you then have to publish it online. There is confusion about the best way to have your site hosted and whether people should pay for the service. A person may not pay much for the hosting but it still incurs a cost.

If you want people to view your site and interact with you and maybe buy things, you need to have your site hosted. The choices of which host to use are varied which means you need to do a lot of research to find what is best for you. Make sure you know what features you need and then look for these issues in a host. Making the right decision can save a lot of money and if your site is a personal one, you may not need every feature available. There area many hosts offering many features but you need to compare them to get the best plan for you.

Each web host firm is different and there are a variety of plans to choose from, some more right for a user than others. There are important issues to consider and these are the ones that should impact on your decision.

Examine how much web space is on offer. It is possible to do this by working out file sizes on their server. Bear in mind that if you need extra sub domains, you can host them if you space left over. There is a need to determine how much traffic is allowed on your site. The host will continuously monitor how much traffic is on your site but having no limits on traffic can be of great benefit to a site. Having a limit on the amount of traffic available may prevent certain users from accessing your site if the limit is breached and this is not good. If people cannot access your site, they will be unlikely to return to the site in the future.

One solution could be to sign with a free web host provider as this will cost you any money and there are many firms to choose between. There are many great offers available and you could earn between 10-20 MBs of space, you could receive POP3 accounts for email purposes or you could be given FTP access. Many users will think who needs a paid for service with so many benefits of a free service and it would cost a lot to get similar services from a paid for host.

A key issue is do you require all the free services you are offered. If not then it is not worth getting a free product, especially if all you need is a server that will enable you to use java scripts or provide HTML data to people who visit the site. Online businesses need more but functions like SQL databases are not required for personal sites.

If you look closely into the picture, you will be able to take a much better and an informed decision. You can go for a paid or a free service provider depending on what purpose you need the website for. Also bear in mind that you might just be considering the image that the web host has in the market. In case of free service providers, you won't be charged money, be sure about it, but they would place ad banners, pop-up windows, hot links or other such objects on the site which you might not appreciate. This will result in the look of the site being hampered and will irritate the visitors as well. The domain name of your site will also be long in that case, so the scope of traffic increasing to your site would be very low. People might not visit your site again if they forget he site's URL, and it's certainly not worth expecting every visitor to bookmark your site for future reference. To add to it, your site won't be reflected so easily in results from search engines, so on the popularity chart, your site would be unlikely to cross a certain level.

If you have a personal website, it would help you a great deal in promoting your professional image to the business contacts or even present or potential employers. So think about it. If you hand over a business card to your actual or potential employer, and in the contact information, he would find your email address as name@freeserver.com, then it would most certainly create a bad impression in his mind. If your present portfolio would be available at something.freehost.com, then you would, for sure, be quite uncomfortable attending the interview. So even though you might be a thorough professional in your work, but if your website or URL reflects otherwise, no one will glance at you for the second time.

A good personal website is what most professionals are considering today. Nothing succeeds like success, as a famous proverb goes. If you have a website like www.yourname.com or an email like service@yourname.com, then it would certainly add to your professionalism. So you might very well invest some money in going for a paid web host service even for a personal website as it would be very helpful to you wherever you go. So don't simply follow people who opt for free service providers. They might have their own reasons to do so, and if not, they will suffer because of their lack of visible professionalism, while you would have the last laugh. Also, if visitors experience any problem with a free host provider, they won't bother visiting the site again, while chances of problems in paid services are far too less.

Image is not for everyone and this is where a free service can be perfect. A host designed to show pictures or stories to friends and family can survive very well on a free host and this requires no money at all. Hosting on a free site will also create a level of experience about how to host a site and this is helpful to many people. It has been said that many people are choosing this option as it improves their skills quicker.

These factors and more is what you need to consider but any decision must be based upon what your site needs. A site for business requires a paid hosting service but a site for personal reasons can exist very happily on a free provider.




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