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Hosting Your Site

A Host is the computer that is hooked up to a high speed internet "trunk line" (usually called a T1 or a T3) 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, on which you "rent" space to place your web site. It is by this arrangement that others may see your site whenever they want. Selecting a host provider is an important step in your web site development, and will be determined by a few criteria...

Do you want a short or long web address?

If you don't care about your web address, there are many free hosting services out there. If you have AOL, you already have 10 Megs of free web sapce at your command. But your address will be convoluted (http://members.aol.com/username/pagename.html), and the page load time will be slow. You cannot use a domain name (www.yourname.com) with the standard AOL webspace.

Much more useful is a dedicated hosting service where you can use an appropriate domain name (www.yourname.com). These hosting services provide very rapid page serve times and excellent uptime. One hosting service I have used for many years with great pleasure and success is SamNet in Wilbraham, Massachusetts USA. Their uptime is over 99.995% (unless you are paying over $1000.00 per month, don't let anybody tell you their uptime is 100%, it just isn't the case), their service is prompt and courteous, and their people are highly skilled. Hosting prices range from $275.00 per year to $475.00 per year and up with special features (secure hosting, dedicated CGI, etc).

There are other free or super-low cost host providers out there, but they will always have a catch, most commonly that they will plaster some advertising material across the top of your web site, which makes for a very unprofessional image.

Once your site has been built and hosted, it's important that you promote your site to the Search Engines and Directories.