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Domain Names
Free Web Hosting
Cheap Web Hosting
Best Web Hosting
Full Web Hosting
Domain Names
The first thing that we recommend to all of our customers is that we take full control of their domain name. By "full control" we mean that the customer and us have immediate access to the domain name, and that the customer and us can at any time make any necessary changes to the domain's online settings. If you do not have full control over your domain name, and you later change web hosts, it can be difficult to have your existing domain forwarded to the new host, or worse, your website may be offline several days while waiting for the domain name to be redirected to the new host. We have seen websites that were previously number one on search engines be completely removed from search engines due to the sites being offline too long. Never take chances with your domain name!
We normally always handle all domain maintenance for our customers, which saves the customer a lot of time and frustration. For our customers who have the time and experience to maintain their own websites, we recommend that the customers set up an account at Enom or at NameCheap. Enom has lower prices but requires a minimum initial account balance of $100.00 before you can purchase domain names for $7.95 per year plus an additional cost of $7.95 per year for ID protection. NameCheap offers a free account, with domain names costing $9.69 per year plus an additional cost of $2.88 for ID protection. Enom is more economical in the long run, especially for customers who have several domain names, but NameCheap is the better deal when using ID protection.
Whether you choose Enom, NameCheap, or some other domain service, just be sure that you have complete control over your domain name's DNS server settings (the host's IP address that the domain name points to), and that you can renew the domain name each year by yourself.
Free Web Hosting Services
Angelfire dependability is good, there are plenty of free add-ons, and there is a site-builder for beginners who do not want to learn HTML. The two main drawbacks of Angelfire are that all of your web pages must display ads and pop-ups, and there are no statistics for you to see which pages are being viewed or if another website is linking to your website. The cost of ad-free hosting with statistics through Angelfire is $4.95 per month, which is more expensive than many full service web hosts.
Tripod is part of Lycos, which includes Angelfire, and so the advantages and disadvantages of Tripod are the same as Angelfire. The one advantage of Tripod over Angelfire is that your URL will be http://yoursitename.tripod.com, whereas on Angelfire the URL is http://www.angelfire.com/home/yoursitename. I personally have a few small websites on Tripod and Angelfire, and for free web hosting services, I have been pleased with Lycos.
50webs is a relatively new free web host that I discovered a little over a year ago. The main advantage of 50webs is that there are no ads or pop-ups. 50webs gives 60mb of disk space to build your free website, which is often enough for small personal and business websites. Similar to all other known free hosting services, 50webs hopes that you will later purchase full hosting and pay for your domain name through 50webs. At $15.00 for a domain name through 50webs, plus the free ad-free hosting, it is actually a pretty good deal. The only real drawbacks with the free 50webs hosting are that there are no available statistics showing which of your pages are the most popular or if another website is linking to yours, and too, the server speed is often slow compared to paid hosting.
Three of the most important things necessary for a website to gain popularity are (1) a domain name, (2) statistics to learn where the hits on your website are coming from (so that you can adjust your topics to fit popular searches), and (3) no ads; especially no pop-ups. While it is possible for a web page on a free web hosting service to achieve high rankings on search engines, it is very rare. If a person only wants a website to learn on and to share with family and friends, then free web hosting is fine, but if you want to create a popular website, then free hosting is not a good choice.
Cheap Web Hosting Services
Flip Hosting Services offers three hosting packages — Entry, Intermediate, and Monster — plus a Custom hosting package to fit most any need. I currently have several websites hosted through Flip, and I highly recommend them. Please visit their website for more details.
There are hundreds of different web hosting services available, and it is not easy to choose the one that is best for you. If your website will require a lot of speed and bandwidth, such as for videos and music, you may want a hosting service that includes a dedicated IP address. For most of us, a shared IP address is plenty good enough for normal websites. Some webmasters collect domain names and then place the domains on a single host that permits add-on domains, which saves a lot of money by not having to pay hosting service fees for each domain name. The final decision of which host to choose can be difficult, but only you know what will work best for your own needs.
Best Hosting Service
There may never be such a thing as a 'best' hosting service, but dollar for dollar and feature for feature, the Flip Hosting Services is surely one of the very best hosting services available for individuals who want to maintain their own websites.
Full Hosting Service
For our customers who do not have the time or patience to build and maintain their own websites, we can host the website, upload the website's pages, configure any needed subdomains, configure email accounts, handle the domain name, and renew the annual subscriptions for the customer. Below are just a few of the problems that many website owners do not know about until after a web hosting plan has been purchased.
(1) The free domain names that are included with some hosting plans are difficult to keep and relatively expensive if you change hosts. A very popular domain registrar has low prices on its domain names, but unless the domain owner uses the registrar's hosting plans, the owner may not be able to direct the domain to another hosting service. A domain name is useless if you cannot direct it where you want it to go. We primarily purchase domain names through Enom where we can direct your domain to any website hosting service you want, and we can do it quickly, easily, and inexpensively. If you later decide you want to manage your own domain name, we can transfer it from Enom very quickly and without any additional cost (except, of course, the additional one year registration cost that your registrar will charge you to transfer the domain name into your account).
(2) Are you familiar with how hosting services work? Do you know about the index page? Do you know how and where to upload pages and graphics? Does the host require that you use FTP? Do you know what FTP is? Do you need a subdomain? Do you know what subdomains are best used for? If you are new to hosting, you may find it very time consuming to learn, and for many individuals it is much less expensive to pay us to do all the hosting work than for the customer to lose time that could have been used more profitably in their own business.
(3) If your website needs a good ranking on search engines, do you know how to link your web pages to gain the best results? Search engines have become relatively sophisticated, with each search engine having specific likes and dislikes of how your website is structured. Every little thing counts with search engines, including your web page URLs.
The full service hosting costs $10.00 per month for a 1 year plan that includes a domain name and plenty enough disk space and bandwidth for most all customers. For the few customers that need additional storage and bandwidth, the additional cost is only a dollar or two more per month. Please call or contact us for additional information about the full service hosting plans.
