You’ve picked out and registered your URL. Now what?

Getting your website designed and built, of course.

Then you have to launch it. Put on the Internet so people can actually see it.

To do that, your website has to be placed on a special computer called a hosting server which connects to the Internet and serves up your website when someone types in the URL.

The service that provides this is called “hosting” or “website hosting” and is usually provided on a rental basis with a monthly fee anywhere from free to hundreds of dollars per month.

Unless you have a LOT of visitors (thousands a day), you’ll want a “shared hosting service” where you are on a computer with many other websites. This is as opposed to a “dedicated server” where yours is the only website on that machine, which is of course a lot more expensive.

The other basic question is Windows versus Unix hosting – the two types of operating systems found on hosting servers. We recommend Unix.

But with literally thousands of hosting services out there, how do you choose one? Generally, you get what you pay for. There are usually reasons why a service is cheap. These are some of the key questions to ask:

1. How reliable is the service? You want your website to be “up” (accessible) nearly all the time (don’t count on perfect).

2. How good is their tech support? If your website is at all important to you, you want 24/7 tech support which is also responsive and helpful. This is far from true with all hosting services.

3. Also they should have a control panel that lets you do a lot of things yourself such as adding email addresses. Two widely used control panels are “cPanel” and “Plesk” – both excellent.

4. Most hosting services provide virtually unlimited email addresses. Most limit email service in other ways. For example, they may have a limit on the number of “concurrent connections” meaning the number of people who can be logged on to their email at the same time. There are almost always limits on the number of emails you can send within a certain amount of time. Make sure they provide what you need in the way of email services.

5. What special capabilities does your website require? These can include support for particular scripting languages parts of your website may be coded in (such as PHP or Cold Fusion), particular types of data bases such as MySQL, shopping carts such as Miva Merchant, blogging software like WordPress, etc.

Your website designer should be able to help you with these issues.