Choosing The Right Web Hosting Plans

As each of us comes from a variety of backgrounds, we have to select the right web hosting plans to cater to our needs and specifications. As a general rule, if you are new to the internet and computer industry, you shoud first get your hands on free web hosting companies. There are two types of free web hosting companies. The first type of web hosting companies provides free web hosting plans with web site creating tools including free and ready templates as well as WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG is short for What You See Is What You Get. This kind of web hosting is suitable for first timers. Google just recently started such a web hosting plan not long ago which is branded Page Creator. Another big web hosting company is Yahoo which offers a similar service to Google branded under Geocities. They have beautiful and easy templates to choose from and if you are wondering if your website will really work with Page Creator or Geocities, I have personally tried Page Creator and my web site works perfectly. Another type of free web hosting plan is where the hosting company provide you with free storage capacity where you have to upload your created web site to their server via FTP. There is little or no WYSIWYG editor in these hosting plans but the great bonus is that you usually have a larger storage capacity compared to the WYSIWYG hosting plans and you can write web page in advanced programming languages like PHP or ASP. Examples of such great free hosting companies are Awardspace and 987mb. Some of these web hosting companies offer only PHP made web site, some only ASP made web site and rarely do they offer both. If you are lost on the technical terms here, let me explain to you firstly what is FTP. FTP is short for File Transfer Protocol. It is an express service that web hosting companies provide members of their hosting plans to upload their files to the server. The difference between the traditional file upload one by one that you get in WYSIWYG hostng company and FTP hosting company is that in the latter, you can copy from your local computer a whole folder consisting of web pages and paste it into the server. This would be extremely useful if you have many web pages like hundreds in numbers. Now let's get to PHP. PHP short for Hypertext Preprocessor is an important and advanced programming languages for publishers to create dynamic web pages. It is developed from an open source solely for developing web site. ASP is short for Active Server Pages whose functions are largely similar to PHP in developing web site. It is developed by Microsoft. If you are new, it would suffice to create a web site in HTML. HTML created web site works in all web hosting companies.

Paid hosting are for those who want to have large storage capacity on the server and has voluminous amounts of traffic. You cannot expect a gigantic web site like friendster to exist on a free web host. Other than storage capacity there is also the need for a unique domain name. You can get a unique domain name from a paid hosting. A domain name is the name of your website for example www.crystallight.com. To get this domain name, you can check with a domain registrar whether the domain name is available. Some paid hosting companies are also domain name registrar. You can register for a domain name with domain name registrar for a fixed repeating annual fee. An example is Godaddy which offers free hosting, paid hosting and domain name registration. Free web hosting do not offer unique domain name and all end with a suffix of the web hosting company's brand name. For example, if you choose Page Creator as your web hosting service, all your web pages will end with googlepages.com. The resulting name will be longer which will result in crystallight.googlepages.com. Notice it does not begins with www, a typical sign that it is a subdomain of a free web host.

If you really need a unique domain name and anticipate a large traffic, even if you are a novice, go for paid web hosting. If you just want to try creating a web site, go for free web hosting.