Web Hosting

As with most things in life if you want the best you will have to pay for it. For web sites this means you will need to pay for some web hosting.

A host is a company that controls your domain and provides space for your site, so that everything appears fully integrated. Your site is on your domain, so it'll look just like any professional web site like Amazon or BBC.

Using a real host has additional advantages in that you'll get many extra features included. Detailed traffic logs and statistics, support for your own CGI scripts, Server Side Includes and PHP support, POP3 e-mail access and much more.

Traffic Logs: Because your host runs the server, they can provide detailed logs of who is looking at your pages with no need for extra coding on your site.

CGI: If you can write your own CGI scripts, or have found the source code for one on another site, you'll be able to upload it to your server and add extra functionality to your site. Like other web space providers, your host may also provide you with some basic scripts to use.

Server Side Includes (SSI) / PHP / ASP etc: All these things can be grouped together as server side programming languages. They allow you to add features to your site. You can get more information on the various server side languages from the Internet, or buy one a number of books which will tell you everything and more.

POP3 E-Mail Access: This allows you to access your domain's e-mail from a POP server rather than through another e-mail address, for example pop.domain.co.uk. You'll also find other useful features that you don't get with the free/cheap forwarding.

Space and Bandwidth

Your host will allocate you an amount of web space and bandwidth. The more you want, the more you pay.

Bandwidth: measures how much traffic your site gets. You will be allocated an amount of bandwidth for a period of time, e.g. 100MB per month. This means that 100MB of data can be downloaded from your site each month.

For example, 100MB per month would mean that 100 visitors could download a 1MB file. Or 200 could download a 0.5MB file.

Costs

The price for all this varies dramatically, but we're probably talking at least £40 per year. Decide what services you want and shop around - there's a lot of competition. Also make sure that your chosen host doesn't charge you extra if you decide to move your site to a rival - if it's not free, there's probably a good reason.

For links to some web hosts, click here.