Step
3: Web Hosting & Design
A lot of people took up the offer of free hosting from service
providers like Yahoo Geocities, GoDaddy etc. In exchange, these
service providers insert their own advertisements into your web
site and often than not, they also impose very limited bandwidth
on your web site. If you have slightly more visitors to your web
site, you will realize that the traffic restrictions on your web
site will start to kick in, and your visitors will have problems
accessing your web sites. This is something that you do not want
to see.
Web hosting is an extremely competitive industry globally. For
consumers, these are good news for us because prices have been
driven so low to less than USD$10 per month for a generously, huge
amount of bandwidth, email accounts and other freebies etc. Instead
of paying thousands to buy, install, maintain a web server, you
pay only few dollars a month for the professionals to take care
of everything for you, including supporting and ensuring that your
Internet business or web site stays up 24 hours a day!
In fact, these days, some web hosts even give you free advertising
credits with search engines, free web site templates and other
freebies when you sign up for an account with them. You can find
one 'super-value-for-money' and reliable web hosting company that
I highly recommend here!
I am using this company for my own web sites and have recommended
them to many of our clients, associates and students.
I recommend them because of the following reasons:
- you can pay for only one domain and host unlimited domains
(so you can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars every
single year if you own many domains. I myself hosted more than
10 web sites by just paying for one!)
- you get a free domain for your hosting plan (so you can save
about USD$10 every year for a domain)
- you can install a blog, forum and many other web software within
a few clicks of your mouse, without having to know any technical
stuff such as HTML!
- you can get 24/7 technical support via online chat, email and
telephone if you need any help with your web hosting account
(I tested their technical support on many occasions at different
timings of the day and I always get them either online chat or
email support)
- you can claim free search engine advertising credits between
$50 to $150 with Yahoo Search Marketing, Google AdWords and/or
Microsoft AdCenter (free PPC credits will vary depending on existing
promotions with the respective search engines) when you sign
up here!
See this video to learn how to sign up for a web
hosting service.
In the past, you have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars
to get a web site designer to create a web site for you. Today,
anyone can create a very professional Internet business or web
site in under one hour using free software that you can download
on the Internet. And the best part is you do not have to be a technical
person to design your own web site.
Take for example, an extremely popular, powerful and free open
source software known as Wordpress. WordPress is a powerful personal
publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features
designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet
as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible. You can download a
copy of the software at http://wordpress.org.
Follow the instructions to download the WordPress software and
you will be up within 5-15 minutes.
Wordpress is famous for its 5-minutes installation, hence it should
not be too difficult for you to set it up, even if you are a newbie.
The default installation of WordPress comes with some default
themes for you to choose from inside your Administration panel
under Presentation menu. If you wish to look for more free Wordpress
themes to be used on your new WordPress installation, you can go
to http://themes.wordpress.net
Just download the free Wordpress theme that you
want to use and upload them onto your FTP server under the WordPress
theme directory.
For details, please refer to the documentation that comes with
your theme. You can also see this video on how you can use a free
FTP software to transfer files from one computer to another.
If you are fast, you can get your new site up within 30 minutes
or less. If you want to get started even faster, easier, then you
can use the web host which I am recommending here!
This web hosting company supports Fantastico on cPanel (the control
panel for your hosting account) which allows you to install WordPress
within a few clicks of your mouse.
However, if you prefer learning and designing
a web page from scratch but do not have the budget of a few hundreds
dollars to
buy Dreamweaver or Frontpage, you can download this free open source
web site builder software at www.NVU.com to
build your first web site.
Go to Step 4 >>
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