3,800,000 for "Web Site Hosting"

That would require an extreme amount of research to find the "best" hosting for

your site. We will get to more on that later. In our last article we showed you

how to select and register your domain name. You must have a place to host your

new domain name. The web site hosting that you select will depend on a variety

of factors. Some of these factors will require a little vision as to what you

ultimately see your web site becoming and this depends on what product or

service that you are promoting.

You will need to consider the following factors when you are looking for

hosting:

Bandwidth

This is based on the amount of traffic through your site. This includes

the amount of emails sent and the amount of traffic from visitors.

Hosting Space

This is the amount of space required to host all of the programs and

pages that your site contains. This includes the size of email boxes

(accounts) that you have for your site.

Number of Databases provided

You will ultimately using a MySQL database on your site. At a minimum

you will definitely want a database for a Blog. Many shopping carts and

tracking programs also use a database to store your records.

Allocation of IP addresses

In order to have a secure shopping cart you will want a unique IP

assigned to your domain.

Number of Email Addresses provided

You will want the ability to have multiple email addresses. It is more

convenient to be able to have a different email address for various

programs that you will be setting up on your domain.

It can be difficult to decide how much space you will actually use. You want to

have enough space and bandwidth to accommodate your site without paying

exorbitant prices if you need more of either but you do not want to pay too much

while you are still building your site. So not only do you want to start with an

amount you can work with you also want to check on what the charges will be if

you need to increase the size of either.

Example- Bandwidth and Disk Space Used

To give you an example of a typical site I have taken 4 of my sites that are of

various sizes and shown you exactly what they are currently using.

Band Width Used Physical Disk Space

Site #16.46 Meg10 M

Lead Capture Site

Site #21.65 Gig 188 M

High Traffic Site

Site #31.14 Meg21 M

Low Traffic Site

Site #43.39 Meg108M

Image Hosting Main Site

You should be able to easily find hosting for less than $20.00 per month to

accommodate your site.

Linux or Windows

Ok now you can go and do a little research and find yourself a hosting service.

One more thing. I recommend finding a Linux host as opposed to a windows server.

I have used both and I have had fewer issues with Linux servers.

Name Servers

In the last issue I showed you how to choose the correct domain and register

that domain. The default settings when you register a domain point the domain to

the name servers of the registrar. You will need to repoint the domains to your

new hosting service.

So what is a Name Server?

That is how everyone finds the sites that they are looking for on the Internet.

This is not as technical an explanation as it could be but for this article it

is all you need to know.

When you type in your domain name into your browser there is basically a search

of the Domain Name System (DNS) to find where your domain resides. The system

finds your domain name server and then finds your domain name and displays the

pages of your web site.

You need to login to your account where you registered your domain name and find

the section that allows you to change your Name Server. You enter the

information for your new host's name server and update. It can take anywhere

from 1-3 days for the new information to propagate across the Internet. I have

seen it takes a few hours to a few days. I have also seen changes take place at

a friend's computer across the country days before I could see the changes at my

physical location.

Basic Setup of New Hosting Server

The majority of hosting that you will find is using Cpanel as the control panel

on Linux servers so I will be using this as reference if all of my articles. It

is very user friendly for beginner and advanced users. There are a few basics

that you will need to setup as soon as your server is setup.

Email Accounts

You will need to setup your default email address. This is the address that is a

catch al address. So if someone sends an email to bill-yoursite.com and you do

not have that email address setup, the email will has to be directed to the

correct location. You can accept the email or bounce it or dump it.

Accepting All Email (Not Recommended)

If you accept all email you will be inundated with a lot of junk.

Spammers will find domains and then use lists of names + your domain

name and randomly send out email in hopes of hitting an active email

box.

Bouncing Email

Instruct the email to send a return response such as Fail: No such

person at this address this will instruct the server to return all mail

that is sent to a nonexistent email addresses to be returned and also

let the sender know that the email address does not exist. Hopefully

there will be no future email sent to that address.

Dump Email

You can also dump the email that is sent to what is referred to as a

black hole. You will not have to receive the email and the sender will

never be notified that the address does not exist.

I recommend bouncing the email.

Now the basics of your server are setup. There will be a further explanation of

some other email setting to come. The default email address is important to

setup right away so that you do not use up bandwidth on junk mail.