There are a lot of hosting companies out there. Anything from $2 – $200 month. So how do you choose?  My guesss is that you are looking for quality hosting, lots of value for the buck and have one or more basic to medium sites you are looking to host/create. If you are are a pro then you probably already know so this is for the rest of us.   My personal recommendation is Dreamhost.  I’ve been wirth them for 8 years now and I have been really happy. They have a good uptime (~99.98%), are very affordable ($6-$10 a month depending onw how long you prepay for), give you a free domain name, offer unilimited domain hosting and email, ridiculously large disk space and bandwith and best of all have 1-click installs for things like Wordpress!

affordable web hosting

So if you want to launch your website today sign up for Dreamhost and let me walk you through each of the steps necessary so that you can have a professional looking site within a few hours.

A terminology of some of the terms used throughout the site.

Theme

The “look and feel” or visual aspect of a website. Many web applications such as Wordpress have the ability to easily switch themes and offer a large resource of new themes to choose from.

Plugin

A small bit of code that extends the functionality of an application such as Wordpress. They can provide additional features such as the ability to create photo albums, create contact forms, sell products, etc. Wordpress has thousands of plugins available to choose from and can be installed with ease.

Upload

The process of taking files such as images, documents and placing them on a remote server such as Dreamhost. This process may involve FTP (see below) or using a web form such as the ones used to upload images in the visual editor.

Download

The process of taking a file from a remote site or server and placing it on your own computer. This process can involve FTP (see below) or simply clicking a link on a website.

FTP

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and usually involves a 3rd party application which allows you to upload or download files. See Resources > Useful applications for some FTP applications recommendations.

A few useful applications to make your web design life easier.

FTP (file transfer protocol)

For Mac OSX, there is a free application called Cyberduck. For Windows, there is a free application called WinSCP.

Cyberduck website: http://cyberduck.ch/

WinSCP website: http://winscp.net

The first thing to do before starting to build a site is to get a domain name.

For each domain name it is possible to get the .com, .net etc.. and other endings (known as the top level domain or TLD). I recommend that you get the .com name if possible.

You’ll quickly find that many of the words that you try are taken. In fact almost every dictionary word is taken! So you have a few options. One is to come up with something that doesn’t mean anything or that spelled in an odd way (i.e. flickr.com, twitter.com) the other is to combine two or more words that are not usually related (i.e. facebook.com, youtube,com).

Try to keep it simple and catchy. Avoid cheesy domains names such as best-web-design-cheap-deals-r-us.com. They lack professionalism and are hard to type and remember.

If you are thinking of marketing your site online then keep in mind that keywords (what people type in the Google search box) are a nice thing to have in your domain name. Also, if you intend to have a local business then you will increase your chance of finding an available domain name by slapping your city/location in the name such as mycitywebdesign.com.

You can use hyphens (i.e. my-domain.com) if desired though I generally don’t recommend them unless you can also get the domain name without the hyphen. This is also true of pural spellings. You run the risk of having your potential clients mistype your domain and go to your competitor instead.

Once you found something that is available then you’re ready to go to the next step. Perhaps come up with a list of ideas and ask your friends and sleep on it.

Here’s a handy form that will check domain availability for you for some of the common endings.