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A Beginner's Guide To Web Hosting
Web hosting is all about owning your own domain name. Your domain name is like the storefront of a business that you actually own. If you are using someone else's domain name then you are like a tenant in a building that is hidden from the main street. Let's just say for example that your business is called prettythings. With your own web hosting, the URL for your business can be www.prettythings.com. However if you are borrowing a domain name, let's say from a free web hosting service called freespace, then your url would look like this www.freespace.com/prettythings. This is called a split domain name.bout all you need to know to demystify domain names and web site hosting!The main problem with the above scenario is that many search engines such as Google and Overture, (which is where you will be submitting your web site to after it is created) will not accept submissions that feature a split domain name. You might be submitting your web hosting site as www.freespace.com/prettythings but ultimately if someone looks for you they will be led to www.freespace.com and have to spend a lot of time typing keywords into the web hoster's search engine to find your site. This is called a domain redirection scheme.Domain redirection schemes are characteristic of free web hosting. Free web hosting sites are supported by advertising revenue which means that your site is often cluttered with advertising banners and pop-up ads. The pop up ads also put you at a disadvantage with using certain features of search engines. For instance, the Google Adwords program will not accept a site that features pop ups or a split domain. Sadly, many beginners who do not know that much about web hosting discover that they don't really have any control over their free domain name until they discover their web site badly indexed in a major search engine or see the memory of their web site eaten up by ads. Then they end up buying a domain name anyway and replaceing every HTML page at their old URL with a custom redirection page. This is a such a tedious and time consuming process that many people just end up building a new web site from scratch. This can really cost you both in terms of time and customer visits to your business. It is well worth your while to pay a moderate amount of money for web hosting and own your own domain name. You can expect to pay between $100 and $150 a year for a good site that often offers you plenty of band-width space, no pop-ups and numerous email addresses. Many web hosting specialists on the web also offer you the opportunity to build your own web-site using colorful and attractive templates and such web hosting perks as free clip art, blogs and chat rooms. 
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