Choose a Hosting Company
Once you have your domain name, you will need to pay a web host to host your website content on their servers. Make sure you do some background research before signing up with a host. There are some shady operators out there who will try to hold you hostage once they have you in their grasp.
For most small businesses, you can get by using shared hosting. This means that many peoples’ websites will be hosted on the same server. As long as none of those sites are getting an excessive amount of traffic, your site should perform just fine.
GoDaddy has dirt-cheap hosting that I’ve found to be pretty reliable. I only host a few sites there that I started in my early years of online marketing and never bothered to move them to another host. I think I pay about $4/month for each website. If you only plan on having one business and one website, this is a very affordable way to get started.
In most cases, however, I don’t like to have my domain name registered at the same place I host my websites. Call me paranoid, but I don’t like the idea of putting all my assets into the clutches of one company. So I usually register my domains with GoDaddy and host with DreamHost.
DreamHost (and BlueHost and a few others) offer very affordable shared hosting as well. The nice thing about these companies is that you can host unlimited domains on one account. I pay about $10/month for the hosting and probably have about 50 domains hosted. Some of these are personal sites, some are commercial, but none of them get more than a few thousand visitors per day. If you start to get a lot of traffic to your websites, most of these companies will help you upgrade to a Virtual Private Server or Dedicated Server so you can increase your server capacity and deal with the increased traffic. These will be more expensive, but if you’re getting that much traffic than you should be making a lot more money!
Your hosting company may offer a choice between Linux or Windows servers. Unless you have a very specific reason why you need Windows hosting, please do yourself a favor and get Linux. You’ll thank me later. Since most open-source content management systems are PHP-based and rely on Apache’s mod-rewrite module to dynamically rewrite SEO-friendly URLs, Linux is the way to go. It can be done on Windows with ISAPI-Rewrite or similar programs, but it’s probably more of a headache than you want to deal with (If all of that sounded like gobbledy-gook to you, don’t worry. Just trust me that using the Linux server will make a lot of SEO-related tasks easier for you).
Hosting Resources
