Choosing a Web Hosting Service Step 2: Setting Up Your Very First Blog

The essential part of choosing a Web Host is to decide what your needs are. So you need to decide whether you are looking for budget hosting, free hosting, FrontPage hosting, e-commerce hosting, or dedicated web hosting.

The logical place to start would be to explain the difference between them all.

Budget Hosting

I think that is self-explanatory. If your main concern is the price …. If you're only going to host one or two blogs on a single domain... It may not make sense to go for a higher end web hosting plan!

FrontPage Hosting

Simply means that it allows pages created in FrontPage can be uploaded to the site. Most sites don't or won't allow us to use FrontPage. Something about scripts and FrontPage extensions, but I won't get into that here. I just wanted to make sure everyone was aware that it is available.

E-commerce Hosting

E-commerce (electronic commerce or EC) is the buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet. It covers a range of different types of businesses, from consumer based retail sites, through auction or music sites, to business exchanges trading goods and services between corporations

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated hosting permits individuals and business to lease pre-configured, state-of-the-art equipment and connectivity from a hosting service provider. A dedicated server will be more secure, more private, other things being equal it will be faster, and it is better suited to complex applications.

Shared Hosting

This is the most common type of web hosting account and can be very low cost. With paid shared (virtual) hosting you pay a monthly fee and get a share on a server. For very low cost plans you may only have a small amount of disk space and a low amount of bandwidth (although this will probably not be a problem for the vast majority of websites). With cheap virtual hosting plans you maybe one site amongst hundreds on the same server - in this case reliability may suffer. For slightly more expensive plans you will probably find better reliability.

Collocated Hosting

This is very similar to dedicated hosting, except that you own the server rather than rent it. Your server is placed in the data center and connected to the Internet through the web hosting provider's fast Internet connection. You will then pay a fee for maintenance and bandwidth.

C-Panel

C-Panel is a fully featured web-based control panel that allows you to manage your domain through a web interface. The idea is to transfer as much of the control and responsibility of managing your web site to you. You have the ability to manage all aspects of e-mail, files, backup, FTP, CGI scripts, and web site statistics.

I can guarantee I am probably missing other platforms for Web Hosting but I think I have covered the basics.

The choice is entirely yours, based on what your needs are. As I stated earlier on I chose Free Web Hosting. Personally I use WordPress. It meets my needs for the moment.