If you think of your domain name as your web site’s address, then the server provided by your hosting company is the “home” the address points to. It’s where your completed site will reside so that it is accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and a browser.

Reliable hosting is critical to your website’s success. Without it the world will never see the results of all your hard work. Fortunately, hosting is very affordable. Depending upon your needs you can expect to pay from $5 to $25 per month.

Over the years I’ve used more hosting companies than I care to remember and I’ve learned two lessons the hard way:

• Cheapest isn’t always (or even very often) the best.
• Live customer support (via online chat or phone) is critical. If there is a problem with your server, you don’t want to wait around for an email from customer support, you want help Right Now!

Based upon my experience and recommendations from other web developers, I currently recommend Hostgator for reasonably priced, reliable hosting.

1 Select your hosting plan

Go to Hostgator.com.

You’ll notice HostGator offers several types of hosting. All of them offer 99.9% uptime guarantees and 24/7 live support. We’re interested in basic Hosting which starts at $4.95 a month. So click on the Learn More… link in the Hosting box.

Now we’ll compare Linux Web Hosting plans. Unless your website is technically demanding (unlikely, since this is an introductory tutorial) the Hatchling plan should be more than adequate. If you’ll be adding additional websites with their own domains later, move up to the Baby plan.

Once you’ve determined which plan is right for you, click the orange Order Now button in the corresponding column.

While it’s easy to think of choosing a domain name and acquiring a web host as the last steps of building your site, they should really be among your first. That way, you’ll be able to completely define your site (Chapter 2) at the beginning of the development process and you’ll be able to upload and test your pages as you develop them (rather than discovering problems at the end of the process).

In this chapter, I’ll discuss the process of registering a domain name, which is basically the address where your website will live online (such as DWcourse.com). In my next post, Purchasing and Configuring Web Hosting (HostGator), I’ll cover the process of choosing a company to host your website and configuring your domain servers.

Domain Names

In the beginning of the Internet era, domain names were available through only one company (Network Solutions) and were relatively expensive to register ($70 for two years). These days, you can register domains with a variety of companies and, depending on the company, expect to pay about $10 to $15 per year.

Based upon my personal experience and the advice of several web professionals, I recommend registering your domains through GoDaddy. They’re a reliable registrar, and are currently offering .com domains for less than $10 per year.

So, let’s get started…

I’ve recently had a number of folks  inquire about domain registration and hosting. I recommend keeping them separate for a few reasons that I’ll try to go into in a future post. In the mean time, here are my recommendations based upon my own experience and those of other web professionals:

Domain registration:GoDaddy

Web Hosting: HostGator

Full disclosure: These are affiliate links, using them for purchases won’t cost you more, but you’ll be supporting DWcourse.