As you probably know, the competition in the web hosting business is very tight, and they need to get creative to get new customers everyday. Giving a free web hosting plan for the customers in one of the way to gain more subscribers for their web hosting plan. However, it is not an easy task because their competitors will likely use the same strategy as they do.

For us, the customers, this is a very good opportunity to get benefits that these web hosting providers give us. We could get the free web hosting plan, and actually host our websites in there without worrying about the monthly or yearly payments. The free web hosting service usually comes with limited features.

However, this shouldn’t be a big problem since most of the essential hosting features already included in the plan. You could upload your website directly from FTP or web interface. It depends on how the web hosting provider prepares their plan. The web interface one will be easier to use since you’re only have to do some drag-and-drop to create a beautiful website while FTP will took you longer to upload and maintain if you know nothing about it.

For a small business, free web hosting is a bad move. Your visitors will think that you’re not serious about your business, and eventually won’t buy anything from you. It’s better for the business owner to host their website in the paid web hosting provider since it could give you more control of your website, more features to benefit from, and also higher trust from your customers.

If you want to build a personal website or just hosting your personal blog, then by all means, choose the free web hosting plan. You could save more money by doing that and only use it to buy a domain name. However, if you’re totally broke, you could use the free domain name that already provided by the free web hosting provider. The domain name will look like this: http://yoursite.freewebhosting.com. It’s a subdomain, but it’s a good one.

To find the free web hosting is easy. Just open up google.com on your browsers and type “free web hosting”. This will pulls out tons of results that you could check one by one. Don’t forget to check out what other people says to when they use this particular web hosting. You want to make sure that they’re saying positive reviews for it because you don’t want your website suddenly disappear and can’t be accessible one day.

As you read before the free web hosting is completely the perfect choice if you want to build a personal website or blog. However, it probably won’t suitable to build a business website since you need a more reliable web hosting to host your website. But, you could use the free web hosting plan to test the features first before you purchase the web hosting plan for your business just to make sure that you’re familiar with the system and comfortable using the features.

Before you start looking for the web hosting plan, it’s better for you to figure out what kind of features that you need or how much you’re willing to pay for it. If you already get it, move on and purchase the web hosting.

One of the most popular webs hosting type is the shared web hosting. It’s because the shared web hosting is cheaper, affordable for small business or people who just starting an online business, and they could upgrade the plan to a better one as they like. Shared web hosting is much recommended for personal and small business owner since you could test your market first with it.

You could test how much visitors that visit your websites or how much disk space and bandwidth that you need. After you figure this out, you could move on and purchase bigger plan that could accommodate your online business needs.

After you get the shared web hosting plan, the next thing you need is a domain name and a website or blog. You could purchase the domain name from the web hosting provider. They often bundle it in a package that allow you to pay both of them in yearly basis for a small fee.

Usually, you will be charged for this yearly, so, prepare your credit card for it. The website itself could be build using the website builder that being prepared by the web hosting provider. If you don’t have the ability or don’t want to waste your time by building the website, you could hire a web designer to do it for you, and put it in your web hosting.

After all the things are setup, it’s time for you to promote your website. There are so many ways you can do to promote your website. Some of them are Adwords and banner advertising. Both of them are very powerful since they reach your target market and attract only targeted visitors. This proven to lower your marketing costs while getting highest profits.

If you’re ready to build your website using the shared web hosting plan, then by all means, do it. Money loves speed. As soon as you build your website, it’s better for you to promote it so that people could visit your website and purchase your products and services, and eventually make you more money.

The website itself is the second thought. You could design a website or ask other people to do it for you easily, but you need to choose your own web hosting and domain name carefully. You could get the web hosting and the domain name in the same place because most of the web hosting provider today provide a complete package of web hosting plan and domain name.

There are several types of web hosting plan that you could choose. Some of them are free, shared, and dedicated web hosting. Each of them has their own plus and minus. Web hosting provider, usually provide you with these three plans that you could choose easily depends on what you need.

If you just start in the online business, you probably want to take the shared web hosting plan since it’s much cheaper and it contains essential hosting features that you need to build your online business. The free web hosting is not recommended because your visitors that you’re not serious with your business since you can’t afford the shared web hosting plan for about $5 a month.

However, the free web hosting is a nice choice if you want to test the web hosting provider features before you decide to buy it. Dedicated hosting could be used when your online business already scaled up and requires more disk spaces and bandwidths to handle a huge amount of visitors and store more files.

To search for the best web hosting provider, you could go to Google and type these phrases in the search box: “web hosting provider” and “web hosting review”. The first phrase will pulls out tons of results of web hosting provider that you could choose, and the second one to see what other people think about those particular web hosting. You need to read other people opinion first before you bought it.

Further on, you could test it for yourself by choosing the free web hosting plan or simply get the trial version. Get on to chat with the service provider via their online support. For some well establish corporate, you might even be surprise if they do provide teleconference support service, ( especially when you become an important client to them ). When you communicate thru these channel, you could access their support knowledge and skills instantly and in realtime.

No matter which web hosting provider or web hosting package that you choose, make sure that it’s really the one that you and your website need. Don’t just choose the web hosting because it’s cheap or anything, choose it because you know it has what you need. Always apply this anytime you’re looking for a web hosting plan.

It is possible for you to have different web hosting providers in the future as you build more websites. Don’t forget to see the reviews and testimonials of particular web hosting provider to make sure that other people have positive opinion about this provider so you won’t waste your money to do the trial and error yourself.

The web hosting providers today should be more creative to lure their customers. They need different offers to give to their customers so that their customers don’t move their web hosting account to other places. That’s why you could see that there is so many offers or web hosting deals across the web that giving you some ‘extra features’ when you buy their web hosting plan.

One of the best web hosting extra features is dedicated IP address. If you have a shared hosting, the chances are that you endanger yourself and your website when you used the shared IP address. Why? Because when one of the other web hosting customers get blacklisted from some websites or services, you could get blacklisted too. So, having the dedicated IP address at least will protect you from other web hosting customers.

Another extra is anti-virus and anti-spam. Both of these features are the best features that you could expect and get direct benefits from it. The anti-virus will protect your website files from any attacks that constantly happen in the World Wide Web.

The anti-spam could protect your email and banish the spam emails that trying to penetrate your inbox. If you want to get the web hosting plan that offer you some extras, make sure you included both of this into your list to protect your website.

The last but not least extra feature is website statistics. You could track your website statistics day after day, week after week, even month after month. If you own any online business or if you sell something from your website, this is the best offer that you could expect.

With this, you could do some experiments with your marketing methods, and see the results right away. You could track down where are your visitors come from, what they do in your website, or which pages that they love most. You could then build a stronger offer for them and use the most effective way to generate more traffic into your website.

For some people, the extra features could be very helpful for their website. While others might think that it’s just some extras that they don’t need. No matter what they think about it, you need to get the extra features according to what your website needs. However, you need to be careful when you get these extra features because some of them are free and some others are not. If you want to get it for free, make sure that there’s no additional fee to get it.

There are so many CPanel features that you could use right away to manage your website and improve the user experiences. Here are some of the features of CPanel that you’ll find useful:

1. Site Tools

Included in this site tools are File Manager to manage your website files, Search Engine Tool to submitting your website into search engines, Install/Uninstall FrontPage Extensions, Redirects, Custom Error Pages, Web Protect, and so on.

2. Email

This email program allows you to add, edit, remove, delete, and change your passwords while using your email accounts. CPanel also brought this email feature further by giving you the Webmail, Auto responders, Mailing List, Spam Filters, Forwarders, and more.

3. Backup

This is the most important part in your CPanel. You need to backup your files often just in case your website can’t be accessed or got attacks from “bad people” that could erase all of your data. You could do an automatic backup for your website too if you like.

4. Stats

This is a feature that will track down your website popularity. Some of the tools available in this feature are View error log, View bandwidth usage, View latest visitors, AWStats, Analog stats, Webalizer web stats and FTP stats.

5. FTP

This is the feature that controlling your FTP account. You could add, edit, or change the password to access it. There are also other ability such as Anonymous FTP controls that could change your FTP login message, and the ability to kill the FTP sessions.

6. Advance Stuff

This is related to your domains and sub domains. You could manage your domains in here and doing some Sub domain Redirects and checking the Stats.

7. Advance Tools

This is provided by CPanel for you to increase maximize your usage of Cron Jobs, SSH access tools, and GPG keys.

8. Add-on Tools and Scripts

Further, you could also find many of open source scripts plus other pre-installed CGI scripts in the CPanel. These scripts are provided by your web hosting provider and different provider will have a slightly different pre-installed scripts. Some of the pre-installed CGI scripts that you can use is phpMyAdmin, MySQL databases, DNS Lookup, Java Countdown Generator, Java clock Generator, Advance Guestbook, Random HTML Generator, phpMyChat, HTML Chat, Java Chat, Bulletin Board, Agora Cart, and more.

CPanel works with almost all web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and so on. Because of the simplicity of the interface in CPanel, most beginners won’t find it hard to manage their website hosting account with it.

Just like the web hosting plans, you could also see the features that the web hosting providers give you. You’ll notice that there are huge differences between each plan. For example, the disk space or bandwidth for standard plan might be smaller than the premium plan. It’s to ensure that you could choose the exact plan that matches your need while saving more money.

To figure out which web hosting type that will fit your need, you could see some of them below:

1. Dial-Up Access Hosting

This is the most basic web hosting type. You could find this type in almost any web hosting providers. The main feature that you could find in this type is the web builder that you could use to build your website fast and easy. This dial-up access hosting is the first and the oldest of all web hosting types.

2. Development Hosting

This development hosting usually used by the web developers. They bought their own servers, and they setup the independent hosting in it for their clients. Every time they have a clients that ask them to build a website or web applications will be hosted in this server, and the web developers could make more money by selling the web hosting plans that they have to their customers.

3. Web-Hosting ISP’s
This web hosting company usually specialized in business web hosting. The users don’t need any dial-up access because they could access their websites through FTP (File Transfer Protocol). This is the majority web hosting type that you could find in almost web hosting plan on the Internet.

The web hosting plans that being offered by this web hosting type could be used by the companies who need lots of bandwidth for their website. The pricing also slightly higher than other types because the web hosting provider who offer you this plan usually completed their offers with a good data processing and support systems.

If you’re a SOHO business owner, the last web hosting type is a good choice for you. You could start with smallest plan that they have if you’re just starting and don’t know how many disk space or bandwidth that you could expect. After you figure out the numbers, you could upgrade your web hosting plan and increase the disk space and bandwidth capacity.

Whether you have a simple website or a complex one, any data that you input into your website will store in a database. To do the changes in your database such ass add, edit, delete or process your database, you need a database management system. MySQL is one of the best database management systems that you can use for your website.

MYSQL also has the ability to create a relational database management. It means that you could input the data, and then put it in the several tables at once. This will make your database organizing more structured than putting it all in a large tables.

Using MySQL database doesn’t always require you to have remote servers. You could also install it in your own PC to build any applications that you have in mind. To interact with various databases that you have, you could use commands from PHP script.

There are several things you need to consider before you choose the web hosting plan with MySQL in it. It’s not just as simple as picking the web hosting plan that has the biggest bandwidth, disk space, email accounts, or addon domains. It’s much more than that. Here are several points that you should have in your web hosting plan in order to run this MySQL database successfully:

1. Database

Figure out how many databases that you want to have for your website. A web hosting provider usually limits the MySQL database amounts according to the web hosting plan that you purchased. MySQL web hosting usually allows you to have multiple websites and more than 5 MySQL databases.

2. Interface

Because you’ll be working with your database frequently, you need a web hosting plan that designed specially for admin interface. It should be easier for you to manage your database in MySQL using the interface they provided. If you’re working on a team, you probably need to create multiple user ID’s. It’s to make sure that only specific person could access specific data. You could choose the web hosting provider that using CPanel because it has a good user interface and dashboard.

3. CRON Support

A cron will helps you to run some scripts regularly and automatically. By using this, you could set up when you want to run the scripts for your website. CPanel has the option for crons that you could take advantage of.

4. PHP

As you probably know, MySQL is the closest friend of PHP. You need to check out for the MySQL web hosting providers that could give you PHP extensions. Before you subscribe to any of the MySQL web hosting plans, you need to figure out the capabilities of that web hosting in managing your databases and PHP. If you failed to do so, you could be very disappointed with it in the future.

When you have intent to run MySQL databases in your website, it’s better for you to choose web hosting providers that offers a complete solution rather than just a usual web hosting that offer pure basic function.

Everybody who used shared hosting service he has lots of complain over his provider. On the other hand, real dedicated web hosting solves all the problems with shared web hosting, but at a significant cost. With the dedicated hosting you have special use ability of an entire server such as all the memory, all the disk space, all the CPU horsepower. You have full power in excess of the server, its resources, and its managerial functions.

Advantages:

• Administer of own file directories.
• Ability to host multiple sites on one machine.
• Can decide the operating system and software you wish to use.
• Create and add e-mail accounts.
• Maintain passwords.
• Dedicated servers could provide the owner great power for customization of server arrangements such as email functionality is very much manageable to outfit your exacting needs through a CPanel.

Because of these benefits, dedicated servers can be measured a better service, which allowing you access to more reliable avenues of content distribution and control over your hosting environment. But with the comparison of shared hosting service, dedicated hosting service is expensive. Dedicated servers are typically offered for a monthly fee to web developers, e-commerce operators and content distributors. The cost can vary from between $100 to $2,500 per month, depending on finances, and the level of client care and technical support.