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Choosing a Web Host
✦ How easily can you upgrade if you want? Does a particular hosting
plan meet your needs without being too expensive?
✦ Does the service offer you a subdomain, and can you register your
own? You may also want to redirect a domain that you didn’t get
through the service. (See the section “Naming Your Site,” later in this
chapter, for information on domain names.)
✦ What kind of support is available? Most hosting services have some
kind of support mechanism with e-mail or ticket systems. Some hosts
offer live chat, and some have telephone support. Talking to a real
human in real time can be extremely helpful, and this is often worth
paying for.
Connecting to a hosting service
The sample pages for this book are hosted on Freehostia.com, an excellent,
free hosting service. You can find many great hosting services, but the rest
of the examples in this chapter use Freehostia. I chose this service for the
examples because
✦ Its free account is terrific. At the time of this writing, the features of
the free account at Freehostia are as good as they are at many paid
accounts.
✦ The pages have no forced advertising. Freehostia doesn’t place any ads
on your pages (a major selling point for me).
✦ PHP, phpMyAdmin, and MySQL are supported — all on the free
account. Often, you have to upgrade to a paid service to get these
features.
✦ You get enough space to start with. The free account comes with
250MB of space. This amount is fine for ordinary Web pages, PHP, and
database needs. You need more, though, if you do a lot of image or
video hosting.
✦ You can have a subdomain for free. Even if your site doesn’t have a
domain name, you can choose a subdomain so that your site has a rec-
ognizable address, like http://myStuff.freehostia.com.
✦ It has a good list of script installers. It comes with a nice batch of
scripts that you can install effortlessly.
✦ The upgrade policy is reasonable. Freehostia makes money on commer-
cial Web hosting. It offers an excellent free service that, ideally, gets you
hooked so that you then upgrade to a commercial plan. It has a number
of good upgrade packages for various sizes of businesses.
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