Web Site Hosting
You have your site ready, all you need now is somewhere to put it. You need a web host.
As with many things, you have a choice.
Use your ISP free web space.
Most Internet Service Providers provide an amount of free web space for your personal use, but it is only for personal use, e.g. for your business, a hobby or a personal site. They tend to object if you start selling the space to your customers.
Other free web space.
You can find free space on the internet, such as Yahoo Geocities or Tripod, but these free hosting accounts are usually subject to pop-ups and adverts. I would tend to avoid these unless you are doing a hobby site. Pop up adverts are annoying and will lose you customers and clients.
Search for free web hosting but look for something without pop-ups or adverts, and remember to check if they provide a form script such as the mailform cgi script as you will need it if you want to insert a contact form in your site.
Commercial web hosting.
If you design a site for a business you really should insist that they host the site on some reliable commercial web space.
You have two choices:
- Design sites and let your customers sort out their own web hosting
- Design sites and sort everything out yourself. Don't give your client any other option - just quote for the design £xxx, hosting £xx and domain name £xx. This means you can choose reputable providers and probably earn some commission from the annual renewals.
If you are going to have your own website design business.
It is worth considering becoming a reseller of web space and charge your customers something like £75 per year for web hosting.
Expect to pay £40 to £50 per month for your reseller account. Find a reputable host with a reliable service.
A reseller account typically gives you unlimited space on a shared server(s). All HTML/CSS sites can be hosted on a UNIX server rather than a Windows(TM) server which is a little more expensive owing to the licensing costs.
If you pay around £40 per month. This equates to £480 per year. If you sell space to 7 of your customers at £75 per year, this equates to £525. Covering your hosting deal by £45, hosting your own site then costs you nothing and any further sites you host are profit.
What do you get when you resell web space?
- You can host unlimited domain names.
- You have unlimited disk space.
- You can create unlimited mailboxes - admin@, me@, you@ etc.
- PHP5 Scripting for building a dynamic site.
- MySql database for above.
- Perl CGI Scripts. Message boards, Counter, Whois(allows domain name search), Guest Book etc.
- Customisable Error Page (404).
- Autoresponders (Sends a message back to anyone who sends you an email with a message of your choice.
- MRA (Routes incoming email to multiple addresses)
- Default Email Routing (Change email routing)
- Error Log
- Email Forwarding
- Search Engine Submitter
- Frontpage 2000 extensions.
- 128 bit SSL Secure server for confidential information, personal or credit card.
- Graphical usage statistics - view the number of visitors and when your site was accessed as a graph as well as numbers.
- Unlimited Control Panels - You have a master control panel, and if your customers wish to monitor their site, or set up new emails, you can set them up a control panel of their own. You can still override or delete the site so you keep overall control. If you do set up a control panel and your customer needs assistance, you will have to sort them out as your host will only deal with you.
This may sound far more than you need, it probably is, but it's there if you need it. One word of caution, if you use a shared server, you won't be able to have a shopping cart. But there are other methods available such as PayPal.
Your first few web sites.
If you don't want to become a reseller just yet, we can provide students and ex-students with a discounted hosting account. We charge students £50 pa per site, which you can pass on at £75 pa, allowing you to make a small profit on the hosting. When you have enough clients to cover the reseller package you can move all your accounts to your reseller account.
If this is of interest or you want further details contact us.
