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There are two key elements necessary for building a new website: a domain name and web hosting space. Many people use the same company for services, and most web hosting companies we review the offer free domain name registration with a web hosting service. (Click here to see the comparison chart web hosting, including information on free domain registration. You can also view information on the reliability of the host and the performance of the web hosting comparison chart. )
A domain name is the address of your site. In our case, our domain name is NextAdvisor.com. You can also have a "parked" domain, which means that you own the rights to the name, but have not built a site to match it yet.
To put the content on your site, you need some kind of web space for your domain name to point to web. Some blog services you can use with your own custom domain name with their accommodation, but for most websites, if you want to use your own domain name, you must pay for your own hosting space. When you have a web host, your site is stored on a powerful computer known as a server, which is connected to the Internet. When people go to your website, the server sends the pages they want. There are some categories of accommodation service in use today. To least to most expensive:
- Free Hosting: Some web hosting companies claim to offer free hosting. Often, these services require you to use a sub-domain on their website (as http://you.geocities.com) or place ads on your site. Generally free hosting is unreliable and limits you to a small site. These restrictions make free accommodation unsuitable for polite, professional sites and can be irritating even for occasional personal projects.
- Shared Hosting: Shared hosting is quite cheap and will be the right choice for most personal sites and SMEs. Our web hosting reviews covering shared hosting, although many of the services that we also tried to offer VPS and dedicated hosting. These services essentially rent you space on the servers of the host, where you share a server with a number of other sites. This is very profitable for smaller sites, especially when you do not have complete control over the server to use more complex programming strategies.
- VPS Hosting: VPS stands for Virtual Private Server, and refers to the accommodation where you share a server with other websites, but your site exists in its own private partition. This offers some features to have your own server and the cost savings of using less space. Users that VPS hosting can have the high-level control of their hosting space because they can not interfere with other users on the server from within their partition.
- Dedicated Hosting: Dedicated hosting is best for very large sites. Sites with dedicated hosting server rented whole and does not share space.
- Accommodation Co-Located: Sites using co-located accommodation clean and maintain their own servers. This option is less common than others and must be chosen by the people who need lots of space and control, are confident they can maintain without technical assistance server, and are comfortable with the significant initial investment of purchasing one or more servers.
You can register your domain name and get hosting at once or register a domain name separately from your web hosting and point your new domain name to separate the space hosting or transfer the name later. If you do not already have web hosting space, we recommend that you register your domain name and purchase hosting space from the same company, because you will save money, time and hassle.
For more information or help understanding what hosting company is best for you and your site, see our detailed comments, the comparison table and FAQ. You can also read the previous blog posts or leave us a comment below.