What type of hosting do you need?
Back in the old days of the Internet you had numerous options for free webhosting with only a small number of sites needing their own domain and paid hosting. Today most of the free hosting options, including the once popular Geocities, are no longer available or are so full of ads that they are useless.
Hosting Pictures
If you are only putting pictures online and you are not a photographer or artist it is often best go simply use a photo hosting service rather than create your own website. Flickr is the best known photo hosting solution. Google’s Picasa also has its supporters. If you do not expect a huge amount of traffic Photobucket is a good option. DeviantArt is a social networking site that can be used to showcase your photography as art. Companies such as Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Winkflash are focused more on prints and photo gifts, but also can be used as galleries.
If you only need to post a few pictures ImageShack is an option which does not require an account, but some people have reported problems with images from ImageShack loading. Please be sure to check the Terms of Service and privacy settings available. If you do not want a future employer or anyone surfing the web to be able to potentially see the picture take advantage of the security setting and use password protection.
Hosting a Blog or Journal
Both WordPress.com and Blogger.com provide free and easy to use options for bloggers. Customization choices are more limited, but there are still nice available designs. For a more personal interactive style journal service there is Livejournal.
Hosting Videos
If you need somewhere to post your new video there is the ever popular YouTube. Even if you post your video elsewhere if you are looking for publicity it is often good to also post it on YouTube. Some people have moved on from YouTube to Vimeo, MetaCafe, Daily Motion, and Pandora TV. Flickr, Photobucket, MySpace, Facebook, and ImageShack also provide video hosting.
Things to Look for If You Choose a Shared Webhost
Although the options listed above are sufficient for many people’s needs sometimes you want a fully hosted website. Shared Hosts (Dreamhost, etc) do have Terms of Service. You have a lot of freedom about what you can post on your website, but there are still a few limits. Many shared hosting services ban or limit sexually explicit material, material about cracking software, etc.
- How long has the hosting company been around? If the company goes out of
business you may lose your website without any warning (as has happened
to many people I know). - What is the host company’s reputation? Do they actually
provide everything they claim? How often do websites go “down” [are temporarily unavailable]? - If you are more experienced at designing websites what features do they support? Sometimes user-friendly means “impossible to do more than basic customization” or “you can’t do what you need to do because we are protecting you from making a mistake”.
- How much bandwidth do they offer? How much disk storage? What
happens if you go over your amount? Can you increase your bandwidth and
storage and how much does it cost to do so? - How many email accounts come with the account?
- What sort of technical support is available? How competent, professional, and polite are their support people? How much does it
cost? Does it include third-party software? (ie What if you are using a
script that wasn’t provided by your webhost?) - How often do they back-up your website or do you have to do
the back-ups? Even if they offer back-ups you should keep a copy on
your computer and other storage media (CD or DVD, flashdrive, etc). - Do you have access to log files that include information such
as the number of hits to your website, what websites link to your
website, etc? - Can you register your website (in other words register your
URL such as http://www.mywebsite.com) with the hosting company? Does it
allow you to use a privacy function.
