3: Setting up a Website

So you know what you want to write about, and you want to get the site up and running.   In this section I will talk through the different options for hosting your website, where you can get started for free, but why you might want to pay out for a more flexible web hosting service.

Free Website Hosting Options

There is a very definite positive to free web hosting options.

It’s free!

This can therefore be a great option for the absolute beginner.  With a free service you can:

• Get started immediately
• Start a new site risk free
• Experiment with different ideas

With the well known blog services such as blogger and wordpress you can sign up to the site, pick a new name, and get posting content within the space of a few minutes.  You can register multiple blogs and experiment with the different services available.  You don’t have to worry about how much it will cost, installing software or keeping the site running.

Sounds awesome!  Why wouldn’t we chose these options every time?  Actually in many cases you may well stick with free sites.  There are many world popular blogs that are hosted on free services and there is nothing to say that this will hold back your web site’s popularity.  However, as your site grows, you may find this early decision has limited your potential:

• Not fully in control. You are subject to what ever content management system is provided to you.  They will update it at any time and you won’t have any say in the matter.
• Advertising may be limited. If you are growing a commercial site then this is likely to be a problem for you.   These free services typically limit how and where you can place advertising units.  Sometimes you won’t be able to display any at all.
• You don’t own the site.  As discussed on the site name page a domain name can become valuable once it has ranked in Google and has many other websites linking to it.  You will never “own” the domain name when using a free service.  Check the small print carefully when signing up to your service provider and understand what the terms and conditions are.

Don’t let these points turn you off these services totally.  They are great for throwing up a quick micro blog and testing out new ideas.  If you are looking at building a long term A list blog, you may want to investigate a paid web server solution.

Paid web server hosting

Buying yourself some web space need not be expensive and will provide you with full control and flexibility.  Many providers will happily install common web site packages such as Wordpress, e107 or phpBB for beginners so you don’t even have to worry about the technical side of things until you want to.

Fortunately most hosts will provide the full range of technologies that you will require.  However it is worth double checking.  If you are looking to use PHP based open source website packages such as WordPress then as a minimum make sure that your provider can support:

• PHP 5 – this is the scripting language used by most open source website content systems, if you want to host WordPress, Joomla, e107 etc then you need this.
• MYSQL 5 – the database software that will store all of your data, again this is a standard for open source projects.
• Apache module:  ModRewrite – worth asking about as it enables clean search engine friendly links.  Just ask if the hosting plan allows you to configure ModRewrite rules in a .htaccess file.  Don’t worry too much about what that means as a WordPress install will help you set that up.

For those starting out, I recommend finding a host that offers a wide range of hosting plans.  Start off with the cheapest that will allow you to run the software you need.   As your site grows, you can upgrade to superior hosting plans that allow for more storage space and bandwidth usage.  I put forward this idea because it is likely your first sites will take many months to grow to significant resource usage.  In time you can upgrade your host through a number of stage:

Shared Hosting Package -> Semi dedicated -> Dedicated Server

A more recent update to the traditional server hosting options includes cloud based hosting.  This is where your site isn’t hosted on just one server but on a whole group of servers.  As far as you and your users can tell the website is operating as a normal server.  However in reality your virtualised server is floating between different PCs.  The advantages of this for you are that the server will have a very high availability rate, sometimes you’ll see 100% up time promised.  This is because is any one node in the cloud goes down then there are plenty of other resources to take up the slack.  This setup is much easier to manage for your service provider which in turn should mean they can keep costs lower than it would do to rent a whole server to yourself.  Everybody wins!

Find the Right Service For You

It is important that you investigate a few local hosting options and try and read up some reviews from real users of the service.  Often the cheaper providers can have hidden charges or reduced support, but sometimes they can offer a fantastic service so don’t rule anyone out without doing some research.   I prefer not to recommend any hosts here, although if you look up who hosts this site you’ll see that I am using eukhost for this particular site.

It is possible to move host later down the line,  however I would advice avoiding this if possible, it isn’t a fun thing to have to do.