Make My Own Website

As discussed on the Build My Own Website page, I think it’s wise to host your own website. That also means you’ve made the decision to own your own domain, and that you decided to build your own websites. Again, I think you are smart in doing all of that.

The next thing you’ll need is a good hosting company.

Hosting Your Own Website and Down Time
After taking the time needed to make my own websites, the absolute last thing I want is to publish them on a service that has more down time than not. So that has to be the number one consideration on who to use for hosting your own website. Any good hosting company will post that information – just look for percent uptime, and 95% is a bare minimum.

Web Hosting Packages
Next, you need to read the fine print on what each of the web hosting packages provides. $4.95 a month might sound like a great deal, but when you find out all you’ll ever get at that price is a single site live on the net, you might not be very happy later on. They may also have restrictions on bandwidth, email accounts and memory use, amongst many other things. Make sure you get a service that allows you to host your own website now, and then as many times in the future – at no additional cost – should you decide to build more sites later.

Bandwidth is just how much information is allowed to transfer from the server your web pages are hosted on, to the computers your visitors will view them on in a single month. It is usually measured in kilo-bytes, and if you “run out” of bandwidth, your site won’t show up on the internet for the rest of that month. That’s bad – especially if you build your own websites for business operations. So … make sure you get unlimited bandwidth from the web hosting package you select.

Email accounts may not be important to you today, but they could be. If you host your own website for business purposes, and it gains in popularity … you may need to hire more employees (think big here!). They will need email addresses. For personal sites, you can give your family members email addresses if desired, even though they still have to have internet access on their own. Ok – could be a small point here, but a good hosting company will provide unlimited email accounts as part of the monthly fee, so look for that.

On the other hand, memory is a big deal. When you host your own website on a server, each page is stored on that computer. If you use a wordpress format, most of that will be in a database. If you created your site with html, then most will be in separate files, just like you have on your computer. Either way, it uses up memory resources on the host’s server, so some will try to limit you. Opinions are varied here, and services grant different storage capabilities … but a good web hosting service will provide almost unlimited memory as part of the basic package. Even if it isn’t “unlimited”, a good provider will have ample memory for just about any site you can build, and they’ll also provide the ability to upgrade at a later date for a reasonable price should you need to do that.

Who to Use?
That’s the real question isn’t it – who to use to host your own website. I can tell you who I use, but this really is something you need to decide on your own. What I do recommend, however, is to start with Hostgator and compare all the others you’ll undoubtedly find from a quick search on the Internet. And do not get frustrated with the time it takes. It is worth the effort to build and host your own website – promise.

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