If you ever hope to make money online or build a business using websites you need to get your own hosting on a web server. There are plenty of options available and the cost varies a lot but to start out you can use cheap hosting which will only cost you a few dollars each month.

  You can begin with a cheap shared hosting account where there are many different users and websites sharing one computer server but then as your online business grows you can build up to ultimately having your own dedicated server which is a computer server used only by you for your own websites.

When you first start out wanting to have your own website there are a lot of confusing terms and jargon to understand but everything will start to make sense as you go through it all.

You will want to register your domain name or URL first. It is generally reckoned that the .com is the favorite type of domain to get but it is more difficult to find good names still available. Some of the alternative endings are .net and .info and the info domains are often offered very cheaply. I register my domains through DrakeDomains.com and they are usually very reasonably priced.

Having got your domain name you need some hosting space on a server for your website to be available online. There are hundreds of companies offering hosting from very cheap services to very expensive ones. Expensive isn't always better and you probably want to find a good, cheap hosting company to start out with.

There are a lot of confusing features offered by hosting companies but the main ones you need to know about are the number of domains or websites you can host on the account, how much disk space they are allowed to use and how much bandwidth you can use each month. You may also be limited in how many SQL databases you can use which is important to know if you plan on hosting lots of wordpress blogs or other database based software.

If you only ever plan to have one small website then most companies will offer enough resources for that but if you lan to grow an online business and develop many websites over time then you should consider cheap hosting companies that allow room to grow.

One of the best cheap hosting accounts I have seen offered, and one I have used myself for over two years is a company called Hostgator. In my experience with this company I have found them to be very reliable and they offer almost plenty of space and bandwidth to allow for the growth of your online business. Over the two years I have used their service I have always found them reliable and helpful on the one occasion when I needed support.

If you want top quality cheap hosting or a more advanced web hosting account I suggest you visit their website and take a look for yourself. I think you will struggle to find better and you could do a lot worse than use them but there are plenty of alternative hosting companies if you would prefer to find another one.

It is important to get webhosting service that is reliable and fast to deliver your web pages to visitors. You will find web hosting offered at remarkably low prices but invariably this means the service suffers.

Yes, you will get lots of web space and, in theory, you get lots of bandwidth but you may be sharing the server with a lot of other users who are all using that same server and bandwidth all at the same time. Many web hosting solutions will have thousands of websites operating from the same server and that is ok if they are all tiny little websites that get few visitors but if you have lots of very active sites on the same server your website may be slow to download and b this does not impress when it is viewed by your visitors.

It is important that any hosting service you use delivers a fast and reliable web page delivery to your visitors so don't sign up for a 12 month contract unless you have a money back guarantee or you are sure the service will be as good as you expect it to be by reading reviews from other users of the web hosting service.