So you are looking for an easy solution to your web hosting, yet are not finding it so easy when it comes to choosing between the many web hosting offers on the market. This is hardly surprising, considering overwhelming number of “review sites” that come up when you search for the “best web host” on Google.

This is certainly a testament to how quickly the web hosting industry has grown in the short space of time. It is also a hallmark of just how much money there is to be made in a cut-throat web hosting industry.

It would be naive to believe that none of these web hosting companies in the review sites are listed there without a little “greasing of the palms” and while this is “business as usual”, these review sites should be viewed with a healthy degree of scepticism.

So how do you find the best web hosting company for real? Nominating a “best” web hosting service on the internet is of course impossible. As one person’s needs vary from the next, some web hosting companies have areas in which they excel or are weak.

When it comes to choosing a host… and this is a step that most people skip. You need to first address your end goals and then look for a hosting company that fits in with them.

You can determine your needs by first answering the following questions:

1. What is the Objective of your Website?
2. Do you intend to make money from your site?
3. Is your site small or large scale?
4. Do you have any technology requirements?
5. What are your traffic goals?

I’ll address each on of these in turn in a minute, but first let’s look at the process for getting a website out there. What you need to understand is where choosing a host fits into the overall work-flow of taking a website from concept to fruition.

Come Up With Your Idea

This is where the journey starts, one day you are in the shower or driving your car or wherever and you get a sudden blinding insight, a flash of inspiration!

This is not one of your regular ideas either… This one’s “the one”. The one you actually do something about and so embarks your journey onto the information superhighway.

Write It Down On Paper

Sadly an oft-neglected step by eager web site creators who just want to get started building right away.

Ironically, and what they fail to see is that they don’t really know what their idea IS yet.

The result is often a crappy job or a heap of rework costing time and money. Another internet failure to be cast into the bowels of Google.

While there is no guarantee of this, the chances of a crappy outcome can be averted by writing your ideas down on paper.

While in the beginning of a fresh new project, it is only natural to be thinking your cool idea will be the “next big thing”, it is usually more productive to think in baby steps.

You will probably hate thinking about baby steps, but trust me, it is quite easy to bite off way more than you can chew and the result rarely worth it!

It is far better to start off with a smaller goal in mind which can be tested and pursued later if the idea still looks promising.

Anyway, about paper.. just writing your idea down on paper makes the concept much clearer in your mind. Draw a few mock-up screens of your envisaged site. Put a few flow-charts together. Consider usability factors.

Consider many different angles and then ask yourself:

Does my idea still make sense when I look at it this way?

If you get your idea thoroughly fleshed out on paper, you will  be much more aware of potential problems with the design. And it’s FAR cheaper to address issues them at this stage than it is when your site is already half way built!

Always keep one thing in mind.

IT’S FAR CHEAPER TO FIX YOUR PROBLEMS “UPSTREAM” THAN “DOWNSTREAM”

The cost of fixing a design flaw is 10’s if not 1000’s of times cheaper when it’s scribbled down on a piece of paper, than later on.

So do yourself a favour and get your idea down on paper before you embark on doing any serious work.

This goes TRIPLE on large scale projects!

Craft Your Unique Selling Position (USP)?

You probably know by now what your website is about. You do right?

What is more important than what you’re about is how you are going to market the thing.

If you don’t have a clue then stop everything you’re doing and go and do this…

Now!

Whether we like it or not the internet has become a vastly competitive arena.

To stand out it is crucial to have an angle. While not so important if you’re just forging your own personal space on the net, I’m assuming you’re set on building a serious site, or you wouldn’t have read this far.

If you want anyone to know your site even exists, you have to find a way of attracting visitors. This usually requires either a unique concept or unique content within an existing concept plus a certain amount of marketing effort.

If your website is on a single topic then you might get lucky and choose a topic that people search on and has absolutely no competition. On the other hand if your website theme is in an established area, then another “me too” website probably won’t cut it!

When planning your website, it is worth doing at least some basic market and keyword research.  This is a topic I might cover in another article, but in the mean time I highly recommend checking out Court’s free Keyword Crash Course.

The course focuses on making money on the internet and while making money may not be your goal, you still need to find a way to attract visitors to your website. The Keyword crash course covers tried and proven methods for researching a niche, targeting good keywords and SEO techniques to increase your capacity to bring in visitors.

Register A Domain Name

Your domain name uniquely identifies your website on the internet from the billions of others out there. It’s like a phone number, but instead of a string of digits it’s forms ia http://www.thedomain.com.

A domain name will only cost you about $10 USD and can be picked up from a domain name registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap. When choosing your domain, it should include, or be closely related to your Unique Selling Position or main keyword.

If your USP is “Cheap Home Loans” then your domain should be www.cheaphomeloans.com or www.homeloanscheap.com or something along those lines.

Chances are if your USP is not very specific then your domain name will be already taken. One solution is to check for the availability of a domain with keywords separated by dashes i.e. www.cheap-home-loans.com, but should be avoided if possible as people typing your URL directly in your web browser generally don’t think in terms of dashes and will type the non-dashed domain instead.

Find a Web Host

Notice that finding a web host is something you do way down in the process and not until you have brainstormed your idea, fleshed it out on paper, crafted a unique selling position and registered a domain.

Yet I’m willing to bet most people rush out and look for a web hosting solution, first!

The fact is, even after registering a domain name might be too early, as you can hold off on finding a host even longer, by building offline using a tool like XAMPP, which simulates a web hosting server on your PC, saving you paying hosting fees until your project is ready to go live.

Finding a web host is an important step, but it is a step in the process that comes near the end, not the beginning.

Build It

I won’t go into the intricacies of how to design a website. But at the very least you should have a website wireframe.

You should know what required pages your site will have and whether the site will have a blog, forum, articles, a mailing list, sitemap, etc, *BEFORE* you start constructing your site.

Actually building the website itself is not actually that tricky, but you will have to know a little HTML, or be prepared to spend a little money to outsource the work. A website can be outsourced at places like 99Designs.com or Elance.com.

Publish It

Once you have created the web pages and initial content for your site, it is time to make your site live.

Depending on how much work you did offline, your site will either be relatively complete, or a skeleton that you can add to later.

Making a site live involves transferring your offline project files to your online web hosting server. How to accomplish this is a topic for another article. What it comes down to is setting up some space on your server and using an FTP client like CuteFTP to transfer your files.

Once your website has gone live you will want to get some user feedback to determine if your website is functioning as it should and meets your goals.

Test It

Now that your site is live, it is time to test it out on real traffic and real people. When you first launch your site, you will probably not have very many visitors, so you should tell your friends and/or colleagues to visit the site and give you feedback.

If you want feedback from your visitors, consider setting up surveys on your website pages. Not every visitor will want to voluntarily fill in your questionnaires. Offering free stuff can encourage visitors to open up about their experiences on your site.

For immediate feedback, you can drive visitors to your website instantly using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, however this is not free. You will have to pay every time a visitor clicks on your ad, so it’s best you do this only for a small initial sample.

Incidentally this is a great method of testing mailing list signup pages, to see what sort of signup rate you get for X amount of visitors.

Optimize It

Once your website is ready for greater exposure, it is time to optimize for more incoming traffic.

Traffic can come from a variety of sources, but the most targeted usually comes from the search engines. Search engines are all about matching the most appropriate websites with the keywords people search so, so getting visitors to your site from search engines is about getting the right keywords ranked your site. Like “cheap home loans” in the case of a home loan niche site.

Generally the broader the keywords, the more competition there is for them, so targeting phrases like “home loans” will be harder to rank for than “first home buyers loan”. The second type of keyword is called a “long tail” keyword phrase because it has more words in it and people are less likely to search on that particular term. This also means there will be far less competition for this term and so much easier to achieve a higher rank.

The cheapest and easiest way to drive traffic to your website is to optimize your pages for long tail keywords and get them ranked high in the search engines. Search Engine traffic is called “Organic Traffic” and is unfortunately also the slowest way to gain visitors, as it can take time to achieve a high keyword ranking, especially if your market is a competitive one.

The fastest method is to pay for traffic using paid traffic like PPC. This is a good way of getting traffic if you are making enough money from each visitor to recuperate the cost you have to pay when they click on your ad. Unfortunately it is a good way of blowing a lot of money if you’re not.

Monetize It

The final step is optimizing your site to make money or gain newsletter subscribers or getting your visitors to do whatever it was you had in mind at the outset.

If making money selling things is your goal, then you can monetize with Google Adsense or another advertising networks, affiliate products and selling your own products directly or with a drop shipping service.

If list building is your goal, then you should be driving visitors to your signup form using a top notch mailing list service. Whatever the goal of your website, you should be testing to see how many of your visitors are taking your desired course of action. Whether that be clicking through to an ad, or signing up for a mailing list, joining in a forum discussion or whatever.

Ok, so in a nutshell, we have just covered the basic phases you take to put a website out there and get people to notice it.

For some websites not all of those steps will apply. I focused on a commercial website development project. If you goals are personal, social, or non-profit, then you probably don’t want much to do with PPC and monetization.

You will still need to constantly market your site to grow your traffic over time.

Questions to Ask Yourself At The Start of Your Project

Having considered the development phases of publishing a website, keeping the overall process in mind at all times will save you from getting bogged down in unproductive work, losing motivation and getting side-tracked.

By answering these important questions at the start of the project you can save yourself potential disaster “upstream”:

What is the purpose of your website?

Will your website be a personal blog, a social site, a news site, a wiki site, a corporate website for a business, an eCommerce site for purchasing goods?

The purpose of your website will help you determine a lot about what hosting requirements you have.

Do you intend to sell anything?

Is your website a sales page for your offline business, or are you going to be trying to make money from your visitors?

If you are thinking about making money, but are not yet sure how to, go about it, you will need to research your market to first ensure your niche has commercial potential.

You should then decide how you are going to monetize your website.

A great way of testing a niche is to build mini site using a free web platform like Hubpages, Squidoo, Blogger.com or Wordpress.org and optimize it for your keywords.

Drive a little traffic to your platform and see if your visitors are willing to buy from you.

Do you have any special technology requirements?

If your website is driven by technology other than the standard web services offered by the typical hosting provider, then you choice of host will be limited to the one that is prepared to work with your specific needs.

Small scale or large scale?

What is your website development budget? Are you starting with nothing, or are you sponsored by a company with thousands of dollars to spend?

What you can realistically achieve will depend on your budget, your skill level and how much time you have on your hand.

If you are building your website in your spare time, it is probably not wise to try and make the next Amazon.

If your project is larger or you are anticipating a massive amount of traffic and can pay a bit extra, it might be worth considering looking into a dedicated server with your host.

Do you have any particular web traffic goals in mind? If so what sort of numbers?

What are your traffic goals? Are you trying to build a small community, or do you want to dominate your area of expertise?

What is your strategy for driving traffic to your site?

How many visitors you can realistically expect is determined by how many people are searching on your target keyword phrases and how easily you can rank for them.

Easy Web Hosting Solutions: Ok, I made you wait this long. Here’s How To Choose A Web Hosting Company

Ok, so I have somehow managed to hold your attention this long

Now we get to the heart of the matter, choosing the right web hosting company.

Perhaps the easiest part of getting a site online is choosing a web hosting solution. Unfortunately the job is over-complicated by the amount of marketing hype and fake review sites!

When choosing a web hosting company there are a few key decisions you need to make. Let’s take a look at these.

Free Vs Paid hosting

If you are serious about building a website, you should in almost all cases choose a commercial hosting platform. The level of reliability, bandwidth and disk space you can expect from a commercial option far exceed what you can expect from a free service.

Saying this, free hosting platforms have their uses too. A free hosting platform might be an excellent choice for testing your website concept before investing more money, or if you intend your site to be a free information site.

But with a free hosting platform there are several restrictions you will have to account for:

Advertising On Free Web Hosting Sites

Most free web hosts impose advertising on your website to cover the cost of hosting your website for free.

The format of these differ, some will require you to show big ugly banners on each page, others display a window that pops up every time a page on your site loads. Others require you to display an Adsense frame on your sidebar.

Free Web Hosting Restricts Your Available Server Hard Drive Space

If you are creating a simple site then the amount of web space might not be too much of a concern, but if your site contains a large amount of images or video content, then you have to be careful your host will accommodate your needs.

Be wary of free sites if you think your disk space requirements might be a problem.

Free Web Hosts Can Restrict Certain File Types and File Sizes

Some free hosts impose a maximum size on each file you upload. Others restrict the type of file you can upload so that you can only upload HTML, GIF and JPG files, (or whatever).

All but the most basic of sites will require a lot more than this, so keep this in mind.

Consider Reliability and Access Speed Limitations With Free Hosting

A site that is frequently down will lose a lot of visitors. While in testing this is not such a big deal, but it becomes painful if it happens too frequently even in testing.

If you are sticking with a free hosting provider in the long term (not recommended) then visitors who find your website through the search engines are going to visit another website if your site is down and you have just lost a visitor!

Free Hosts Can Impose Restrictions On FTP Access

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Having multiple FTP accounts will allow you to give friends and employees their own FTP account. This will allow you to give them as little or as much access to your website as you choose.

Some free web hosting services do not permit FTP access and only allow you to design pages with their own builder. This is nice and simple for beginners, but if you are doing anything more advanced, you will want to edit your pages offline in a capable HTML editor and upload them to your web server with FTP.

Free Hosts Can Have Limited Scripting Languages Support

Perl and PHP are two popular scripting languages that allow custom website coding.

While it was once important to consider that your free web host supported any scripting languages you might need, there are now many free script hosting services available that provide counters, search engines, forms and mailing lists and so on, without requiring you to dabble with Perl or PHP scripts yourself.

If you are sure you require scripting support from your web host, you need to know the kinds of environments these scripts run under and what software versions they are running.

You also need to know what sort of access to particular features you have access to like the mail() function for php and sendmail() for Perl.

Many Free Hosts Limit Your Bandwidth Allocation

Many free web hosts impose a limit on the amount of traffic your website can use per day or per month, so if your pages are highly graphical and get loaded often by your visitors, you might quickly exceed your bandwidth allocation.

In general, 100MB traffic per month is far too small for anything other than a personal home page. 1-3GB of traffic per month is usually quite adequate, but your mileage will vary depending on the your site.

Considerations of a Commercial Hosting Solution

A commercial web hosting solution is recommended for all but the most minimal of sites.

When choosing a commercial host, many of the same considerations of a free host apply, but as you are paying, you naturally expect a much higher quality of service and support.

Reliability and speed of access – does a hosting company provide a refund if it falls bellow their threshold

If you are paying for a web hosting company, Not only do you expect the service to be both reliable and fast, they should GUARANTEE your uptime.

At a minimum you should have 99% uptime and the host should provide some sort of refund if it falls below that figure. If you find your web hosting company is providing you a lower level of reliability than this, then you should change hosts ASAP.

Be Wary of “Unlimited” Bandwidth Claims

We have talked about bandwidth allocation with free web hosting companies. With commercial web hosting companies, you can expect the bandwidth to be much higher.

Do not be unduly swayed by the promise of “unlimited” traffic. Almost all commercial websites will claim this as part of their marketing pitch. What you should know is that there is really no such thing!

If you expect your website to be a high traffic one, then pay close attention to your host’s policy statements. Usually you will find that they redefine “unlimited” to be limited in some form or another.

Bandwidth should not be a problem in most cases. A typical website will have less than 3GB of traffic per month.

Be Wary of “Unlimited” Disk Space Claims

Like bandwidth, disk space is commonly advertised as “unlimited” which it’s not. You probably only need to be concerned if you are hosting images or videos or any content that requires a lot of large files be stored on the server.

If your webpage is “normal”, then you can probably get by with only a few 100MB. If your needs are greater, read the policy statement.

Technical Support Should be Available 24/7

Your web hosts’ technical support should function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year round. Do not accept a host that will not have staff working on weekends or public holidays.

Consider Murphy’s law. If something is to go wrong, it usually will and at the worst possible time. This usually means your server will crash on weekends and public holidays.

Often a host will advertise 24/7 support, yet won’t really deliver on their promise. To find out if they do, test them out by contacting them at midnight or on weekends or public holidays. If you have to wait a few hours (or a few days) then the signs aren’t promising.

Website Scripts and Services

Your web hosting company should provide a large suite of services and other goodies. Most are standard fare, but some hosting companies provide extras that can be handy.

At the very least a commercial web hosting company should provide FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, MySQL and crontabs.

We will shortly be publishing a complete listing of web hosting services and other terms and definitions.

You can check what your host is offering against our list to determine that you have the scripts and services that you require.

Price

Price is always the factor people look at first, but it is far from the most important one.

These days good quality web hosting can be had relatively cheaply and the challenge becomes more about finding the most reliable service that fits for your needs and requirements.

Contracts and Hidden Fees

Ensure your web hosting company has no locked in contracts or cancellation fees and if they do, that you know exactly what they are.

If your web hosting company is providing a poor level of service, you want the freedom to change to another host without getting hit with a hefty cancellation penalty.

Money Back Guarantee

Some web hosting companies will provide a money back guarantee. This is a good sign as they are willing to back themselves in terms of level of service.

Setup Fees

Does your web host charge you a setup fee? If so ensure you take it into account. Ideally there should be no setup fees.

Payment Frequency

Most web hosts give you the option of electing to pay annually which gives you a cheaper rate than if you were to pay by the month.

If you are unsure about your host you might prefer to pay monthly until you are more certain of your host’s reliability and honesty. This way you’re not tied up with a bad host for the entire year.

Resellers

Not all hosting companies own or lease their own web servers, some are actually resellers for some other hosting company.

Are you buying through resellers? The trouble with some resellers is that you might be dealing with people who don’t know much about the system they’re pitching at you.

If they are ignorant of the ins and outs of the technology, they will take longer to resolve your problems as they have to go back and forth between the actual hosting company.

There are a number of good resellers however and some know what they’re doing and even offer web hosting a lot cheaper than the actual hosting company.

If you find out you are dealing with a reseller you will have to check out the reseller as well as the hosting company.

Location

You might want to choose a host with a local provider instead of some remote server elsewhere in the world. A local host offers the advantage that you are not far away if you ever have an issue to resolve with them.

On the other hand by broadening your options to include anywhere else in the world you stand a better chance to find a more competitive deal.

Most web hosting companies are capable of resolving issues remotely over the phone or over the internet. Depending where you live you might find a remote host has faster internet speed in the region where most of your visitors are present.

Final Tips

While reading web hosting reviews can be insightful, treat them with a healthy dose of skepticism. Many are affiliate sites and get a large commission for recommending the hosts that rank highest in their lists.

If you consider a wide enough pool of sources, visit enough forums, read enough information, you eventually learn to weed through the hype and get a better feel for what’s real and what’s not.

Give more weight to people’s personal recommendations and be wary of what people say in web hosting forums, as they might actually be affiliated with a web hosting company they’re promoting

Research your web hosting candidates directly, by going to the source, visit their forum to see if any issues and problems are coming up over and over.

When you sign up with a web hosting company, put them on a “probation period”. Give them a fixed amount of time to earn your trust and if you are not happy, cut them loose and find a better host.

Top Free HTML Editors

Website design does not have to cost a fortune, provided you’re prepared to put in some time and effort. A professional looking website can be designed and implemented using the following FREE tools and others. If you know of other tools that are not on this list, but you think should be, then by all means let us know.

Komodo Edit
HTML-Kit
Nvu
Arachnophilia
1st Page 2000
KompoZer

Top Free Graphics Editors

Paint.net
Gimp
GIMPshop
Brush Strokes
Helicon Filter
Krista

Choosing an Editor

Wikipedia has an extensive comparison of both Free and Commercial “raster graphics editors”.

Free Dynamic Content Platforms

Wordpress
Drupal

Free Domain Registration

http://www.co.cc/
http://free-name.org/

http://freedomainname.freedomainsite.com

http://www.freedomain.co.nr/

Free Hosting

There is a comprehensive list of 270+ free webhosts located at free-webhosts.com. Their listing contains the amount of disk space you are allocated, scripting options supported and whether or not you are required to display banner ads on your website.

http://www.110mb.com/

Web Design Tutorials

HTML Code Tutorial
Webmonkey
Dynamicdrive

This page is not in stasis, it is a living, growing entity. If you would like to suggest free tools, or web design resources that are particularly useful, we’d love to add them to the list. Contact us here

So you decided to build a website and now need a designer to create it and a hosting platform to publish your creation for the world to see.

Here we will give you some advice on how to make the experience as smooth as possible and ensure you get the most for your money.

There are many options available when it comes to getting a website published on the World Wide Web. The best choice for your needs depends very much on your goals and how much you’re willing to spend.

Before you approach a designer,  give some thought about what you want to achieve from your website. A little forward planning will make it a lot easier to communicate what you want and could prevent expensive rework down the track.

You can have a Nissan Sentra, or a Mercedes Benz

But remember, you get what you pay for. Ask your web designer what your can reasonably expect on your budget. You might get a cheap website designed for under $200 USD, but don’t expect the quality to be stellar. This might be perfectly fine but consider your needs.

Do-It-Yourself vs Hiring a Professional Designer

If you know a little CSS and HTML, you might consider doing the job yourself. Doing your own design means you can take control and create your site exactly the way you like it. In practice it is not always as easy as you think and will often take far longer. A professional designer will likely achieve results faster and maybe even cheaper. You are effectively trading time for money, his time for your money.

Choosing a Web Designer

There is plenty to be said for developing a long-lasting, healthy relationship with your designer, especially if you think you might need more work done in future. Finding someone in your local area is highly recommended as meeting in person can often make communicating a lot easier.

Consider their portfolio and level of experience. Look for someone with at least a couple years of experience or a lot of projects to their name, also try and find someone who has worked on the type of site you want built.

I probably don’t need to say this, but ALWAYS get your agreement down in writing. If you have done the right preparation work, this will be much less of a pain and it will certainly save a lot of hardship further down the line.

Consider if the price is going to be fixed or will vary depending on future changes. If you work on a fixed price, ensure you clarify what constitutes a finished project, also clarify how you will handle maintenance and revisions.

You might have to work with more than one designer before you find one you are happy with. If your budget allows it, offering a small, initial project is a good way to test their ability before moving onto bigger things

Choosing a Host

Many website owners think web hosting is simply the server where your web site is stored. While this is true, there are a variety of other services a web host offers that will help you move your site from dream to reality.

A quality web host is responsible for doing a number of things:

• Keep up to date with software technology
• Monitoring hosted websites and uptime guarantees
• Regular hardware upgrades
• Provide tools and technologies for customization and growth of customer’s websites

When researching your host a good starting point are searchable directories that offer comparison on popular hosts. One must be extremely careful online because many of the websites promoting web hosts are actually affiliates who give biased reviews.

We have compiled a short list of the more recognized hosting directories here.

Web hosting forums like WebHostingTalk.com are also good places to ask relevant questions.

Seperate vs All-In-One Hosting and Deisgn Packages

First consider that you don’t need to hire the same company to handle both the web hosting and design. Sometimes you get more value for your money if you hire a professional company to handle the web design and another to handle hosting.

While it is convenient to have a professional web designer take care of the hosting as well, consider where their strengths lie. Many web designers spend the majority of their time designing and maintaining sites and have little time left over for website monitoring, uptime guarantee and regular hardware upgrades.

In their defense, this has a lot to do with the workload they are under, but if their hosting service is unreliable, then it might be smart to go with a seperate hosting company.

ADSL – an acronym for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, is a broadband technology that utilizes copper telephone lines to transmit data faster than traditional modem technology, in effect increasing the speed of data communication and distribution on the World Wide Web.

Traditional Dial-up modems are generally only capable of a maximum bitrate of 56 kbit/s (kilobits per second) and require the full use of a telephone line—whereas ADSL supplies at least double this bandwidth without disrupting telephone use.

ADSL Web Hosting is somewhat of a misnomer. ADSL is an option offered by an internet service provider (ISP) and not your web host. You can rest assured all respectable web hosts around today, will allow you and your visitors to connect to your website at ADSL speeds.

Freedom of speech is the concept of being able to speak freely without restrictions or censorship. While the internet alludes to this ideal, in reality website hosts and the sites running on them are subject to degrees of freedom depending on the laws governing the location of the web host’s server.

In the United States, the limitations of the website host depend upon the laws and policies of the individual state. Although rare, in a worst-case situation, a site owner may face consequences when unfamiliar with that state’s stance on free speech, also many website hosts are wary of controversy and will not hesitate to close down a websites that creates conflicting views.

Free speech web hosting are hosting services that have taken a stance in protecting freedom of speech on the internet. These companies are familiar with the legal issues surrounding fair use, trademark, copyright and slander. If a lawyers attempts to demanding that something be taken down, they are not afraid to stand up for your first amendment rights.

A free speech web site is uniquely set up to deal with legal threats and have structured their business around liability insurance enabling them to help to protect the site owner and other individuals against possible lawsuits.

In short, if a lawyer tries to block legal content, they better have a legitimate court order in hand to do so.

Limitations

Freedom of speech does not, of course mean “anything goes”. Should you engage in criminal activities you will likely find your website shut down in short order. Examples of content, not protected under free speech include: threats, subjudicy, defemation, obscenities, treason, slander, hate speeches (“flaming”), the willful spreading of lies, causing widespread panic, child pornography, ripping off intellectual property, pirated software and music files.

Web Hosts that Offer Free Speech Web Hosting

While many web hosts are fans of free speech, only a few have positioned themselves to fight attacks against it. Should your website come up against opposition, your will likely be dropped fast, especially if you are using a small host without the resources to fight an extended legal battle.

Fortunately there are a select few hosts who will fight for your cause and not cave into external pressure and vicious attacks on your freedom:

• Softlayer
• Computer Tyme Web Hosting
• NearlyFreeSpeech.Net
• CrisisHost
• Project DoD
• 1st-Amendment.Net
• Free Speech Web Hosting
• Zensurfrei
• Grex
• NearlyFreeSpeech.Net
• SecureServerTech
• iWeb8
• Beachcomber

Whether you are planning to host a new website or would like to move your existing website to a new hosting service, it’s time to venture in to the world of web hosting.

Website hosts and how they work can be confusing to people, especially if you do not have a lot of technical knowledge. At the same time, it is very important to understand how hosts work and how different hosts vary in order to get the best deal and avoid common and costly mistakes.

On this site you will get a proverbial crash course in web hosting. We will explain the different types of web hosting deals that are available and how they work and in what situation each type of web host is best for you. You will find time and money saving tips and suggestions on how to insure that your web hosting experience goes smoothly.

If you are building a new website from scratch and don’t know how, we will also cover how to get started on web design, whether to design your site yourself, or hire a professional designer, the ins and outs of working with a designer and how to negotiate a contract that is satisfactory to both of you.

What is Web Hosting?

At a basic level, a web hosting service is space on a special type of server that is capable of making your web site’s files available on the World Wide Web. Web Hosts are companies that own and manage these servers and are responsible for ensuring they are kept running smoothly and that hardware and software is upgraded and up-to-date.

In a perfect world, you would get just that – cheap, reliable web space on servers that are perfectly maintained and up-to-date. But in reality there are wide degrees of quality and service between hosts. There are also different types of hosts to consider for different situations.

Different Types of Web Hosting

Web hosting is not simply a matter of buying web space and away you go, there are a multitude of packages offered by web hosts, selecting the one based on your needs should be your first goal.

Essentially when you are selecting a web host there are four fundamental options:

• Free hosting – there are many services around that will host your site for nothing, usually you are required to display advertising on your site. This option is great for personal web pages, but limiting for businesses.
• Self hosting – a web server can be run on a personal computer using your Internet Service Provider’s bandwidth. This option is ok for small websites and has the advantage that you don’t need to run ads on your site. You must manage and maintain your own server which will require a degree of technical skill and it is important to check your ISP’s terms and conditions before self-hosting as some ISP’s frown on this practice or ban it outright!
• Shared hosting – this is the most common web hosting option. With shared hosting, your website resources are maintained on a host’s web server that is shared with other customers. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU.
• Dedicated – this option is the most expensive, but provides the most optimal web solution in terms of bandwidth and resources. Unlike shared hosting your website is hosted on it’s own dedicated server. The option is ideal for large websites that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors daily.

Whatever your unique needs are there is a web hosting solution just for you. Read on to discover how to get the right web hosting plan for your own unique situation that is the most reliable and cost-effective.

SEO stands for search engine optimization which is essentially is a set of skills and techniques that make a web page stand out in Google and other search engines. A page that is search engine optimized, will show up higher in the “natural” search engines and so will attract more visitors.

Do you have need for website design SEO services? If you do, you are certainly not alone! In this competitive age, good web design alone is simply not enough to ensure a successful site. Unfortunately as far as Google is concerned, if you build it, they won’t come!

First of all you need to find someone who can create a great looking website design. A design that immediately captures your visitors attention and inspires action. Then you need to get your web page noticed! This is where active marketing and SEO comes in.

SEO is a specialized design practice that baffles many, so it is essential that you find a designer who knows what they’re doing. Ask your designer if they will include SEO on the pages they design, but realize that SEO may not be their specialty in which case you may need to seek an SEO Expert.

A common mis-perception is that your choice of web hosting company will undermine your search engine ranking. Fortunately this is simply not the case. SEO is determined by the HTML coding of your web pages and the organization of your website and it’s resources.  You can rest assured any web host you choose will not impact your ranking with the exception of some Free Hosting services.

Free Hosting Might Not Be So Good for SEO

Free web hosts are one of the few exceptions where your host may undermine your SEO performance. This is because your Domain Name name (the “http://www.xx” thing you see in your address bar) does have a slight impact on ranking for certain search terms. Many Free hosts force you to use their domain name or pose other restrictions that will limit your SEO score.

Find an SEO Specialist or Do-It-Yourself?

If you are concerned about your web designer’s SEO abilities (or lack thereof), consider contacting an SEO Specialist like Aaron Wall of SeoBook.com, or if you are technically skilled and can spare the time, take action yourself!  SEO is relatively easy to learn and there are some great free educational resources available online such as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and SEOmoz’s Beginner Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

Whichever route you decide on, realise that building a great website is not enough to succeed online. Following good SEO and active marketing practices are cornerstone in ranking higher in the search engines and getting visitors coming to your site.

While you can always Google to find a web hosting deal, the problem is you are bombarded with literally TONS of pages competing for your attention. While we live in a commercial world where everyone must try and get noticed, this unfortunately makes it difficult when seeking objective, unbiased information as a consumer. This is especially true in the web hosting market where affiliates can make a healthy profit publishing biased reviews on the hosts that will pay them the highest commissions.

Fortunately there are independent directory sites that are designed specifically for the task of finding a web host. The following list includes some of the more respected web hosting research sites to be found on the web.

• CNet Host Power Search – prices of web hosting providers and resellers
• FindAHost.com – a web hosting directory/search engine since 1998
• HostReview.com – web hosting review and information base
• WebHostingTalk.com – perhaps the internet’s largest web hosting discussion forum
• HostIndex.com – web hosting directory and resource site