There are about as many web hosting sites and web hosting plans out there as there are web sites.  Have you ever thought about it?  Do you know what to consider when deciding where to ‘buy’ your property?  This can be as important as choosing your address (URL).

When building a site on the Web or starting a blog, the first decision you have to make is where to put it. Where – well on the web of course – NOT.

I have been tinkering with websites for about . . . going on 10 years. With each new thing I try I learn something new. It would be nice to know these things at the very first.

The first site I ever put out there on the web was for my church. I was trying to keep costs down, so I found all the free stuff I could use.  The only trouble with most of the ‘free’ stuff, especially web hosting, is that they put whatever ads they want on your site. With a church, it isn’t good to have gambling, drinking, etc, advertised on your site.

Then I found out there is a thing called bandwidth. If you want to put audio sermons out there, you have to get the right bandwidth to broadcast them. The software can be gotten for free, but the bandwidth can’t.  I found ministries.com which gives churches and other non-profit organizations half price.   This hosting service provides the bandwidth to put audio sermons and a lot of other accessories – including a secure shopping cart and a blogging platform.  I have a good experience at there and recommend it to everyone with a non-profitable organization.

Which brings us to email programs. I found some hosts do not offer any and some only give you mail forwarding. Then if you get into e-Commerce and want more than one site, you need to know if your hosting plan will support more than one site. For instance – if you like to blog. Usually a blog revolves around one subject – say starting an online business. If you want to blog about another subject – say raising children – it would not fit on an online business blog. If you get the correct web host, you can create all the blogs you want.

Now, with blogs, there are 2 large blog sites I know about – Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. You can make multiple blogs on both of them. They do have their rules to abide by and you have to adhere to the rules. On the other hand, wordpress.org will let you get a copy of the wordpress ’software’ to put on your ‘web property’. When you do that, you can add extra plug-ins and widgets to use on your blog.

That brings up another point. Some hosts will let you get to the ‘back end’ of the site – that is straight into the files either with an FTP program or through the control panel. If you have access to the ‘back end’, then you can add the plug-ins to a wordpress blog sitting at your site.

Another item to consider is if the web host will allow you to use your own domain name (your address), or make it a sub-domain of their domain. An example of this is again word press. The domain is www.wordpress.com while the sub-domain would be like joyntheir.wordpress.com. You may have a difficult time finding a URL you like that is available. Some sites will give you suggestions of similar URL’s that are available – the dot portion of which may be the only difference; i.e., bodybuilding.com, bodybuilding.org, bodybuilding.net, bodybuilding.us, bodybuilding.uk, etc, etc. If you are concerned about your URL – like including keywords in it – then you may want to buy all or several versions of the URL if just to keep others from using them.

Some hosting plans will let you use purchased URL’s for your sub-domains, and some will not. You can also use a .php file to make sub-domain names – for example: your domain is fitness.com and you add a blog. The URL is www.fitness.com/blog. To make it simpler, you can build a php file that says ‘http://www.fitness.com/blog’ = ‘http://blog.fitness.com’/ Cool trick?

I was pointed to a good place to ‘purchase’ domain names:  StartLogic. The price for a URL is the lowest I have seen. And you can ‘park’ your URLs there. They also give a decent hosting plan which include also has Free setup/domain, Web builder, unlimited emails, PHP, mySQL, CGI, and FrontPage.  You can host as many domains as you want under one account, or get a reseller program.

Another good spot is  Webhostingpad.com which has plans for a little over $5 per month.  With their fantastico program, you can put many program platforms on a site, including wordpress, b2evolution, and drupal to name a few.  You can purchase as many URL’s as you wish and set them up as add on domains so each blog or site has its own URL.  It also has a good email program.

Other good hosting sites are:

Host Gater
Blue Host
IX Web Hosting

I know there are probably a lot of other details to look at.  Are there any other considerations you are concerned with in choosing an online host?