The Importance Of Good Hosting
The most basic requirement for running a successful home business is a "proper" website
This means having your own hosting and domain name
A domain name is simply a web address such as www.somedomain.com
This is something you can register, simply by picking a domain name of your own choosing
This can be with a variety of domain extensions eg. .com, .net, .biz, .org etc
Most of the time you can purchase a new domain name for FREE as part of your hosting contract
Hosting
Hosting, simply means the server where your webpages are stored
Your website must be hosted somewhere and this is usually on a "shared server"
Therefore I would recommend that you get started on the right footing and find a host and domain name of your choosing
You do need to be careful here because not all hosting services are quite what they seem.
Reliability is the key - you don't want to find your website keeps going offline due to your hosting service not being very good
Hosting services that I have used with no problems are:
Why Is FREE Hosting Not A Good Option?
FREE hosting from providers like Geocities and FreeWebs is not a serious option if you really want to build a successful buisness online
Many newbies start off with this option, thinking that "having your own website" means having a FREE provider
The reason FREE hosting doesnt work is that first its a very limited service. None of the things you really need access to are provided e.g. many do not allow you access to your cgi-bin or to use PHP pages or scripts
Another really big handicap with FREE type hosting is that the bandwidth limit is extremely low. You will find that you will run out of bandwidth very very fast
For those of you who are new to hosting services, bandwidth is the total amount of memory used up by people viewing your webpages. Every time a webpage is loaded memory allocation is being used up. With FREE services the whole idea is to give you as little bandwidth as possible to force you to upgrade later
The other problem is that FREE hosting sites will find it extremely difficult if not totally impossible to get ranked anywhere very highly with the Search Engines
So the long and short of it is if you want to succeed you must have proper hosting from the beginning
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