Web Hosting and Domain Registration

Articles : Basics of Web Hosting and registering a Domain Name

Day by day more number of people are businesses are going online to grab the unlimited and vast potential of the Internet. Creating a website and uploading is very easy these days with latest developments in hosting softwares and new web designing techniques and tools.

First step for going online is registering a domain name. First decide a domain name extension you want to use (.com, .in, .org, .net). .com is the most common used extension so it is very difficult to get a meaningful word with .com extension.

If your website is only for Indian customers then you can go for the .in extension. Now most of the shared hosting packages come with a free Domain registration if you choose a long term contract.

Hosting Platform, Web Space and Bandwidth

Second step is to select a web hosting company. This is a very important step as there are many parameters for hosting a web site like

Hosting Platform : You have to select a hosting platform like Windows or Linux. Linux platform uses opensource softwares like Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. So it will be cheaper compared to Windows. Unless you are going to host any Microsoft Windows specific applications you can go for Linux as it is more robust and efficient platform.

Web Space : Web Hosting company's offer will specify the amount of space it will allocate to you on their server. Normally it will vary from 10mb to unlimited. For a startup web site even 10mb will be sufficient unless you use emails extensively.

For eg in a 10mb space you can upload 100 50kb html files. But remember you have to share this 10mb for all your log files, image files and emails. So 50mb would be ideal. Now many major hosting companies are offering unlimited space too.

Bandwidth : This is another important factor in web hosting. Bandwidth is the total amount of files uploaded or download from the site calculated in MB or GB. When your number of visitors increases your bandwidth also will increase accordingly.

Apart from these basic parameters hosting companies will put many restrictions or usage like number of concurrent users, maximum database and email usage, number of subdomains, CPU or Memory usage limit etc. Read their usage terms carefully especially if you are planning to host a big site.

Part 2 : Hosting Plans and Selecting a Provider