Capital Professional Services

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of web hosting providers in the United States. How do you know which one to use — which ones are the “good ones”? They offer different packages and features. Which ones do you need? Let’s look at a few options.

Free hosting

One of the best ways to keep costs down is to use a free hosting service. Most free hosting services do not provide you with a domain name. You use the service provider’s name with your choice of web site name added before theirs or in a folder listed after theirs, eg., http://company.comcast.net or http://www.comcast.net/~company. This probably would be okay if you were building a personal web site, but for a company this would be very unprofessional and probably would not do well in the search engines either.

There are also free hosting providers who will let you use your own domain name. This sometimes requires a one-time setup fee. Most of these providers will have bandwidth restrictions and a smaller amount of storage space for your files. This limits what you can put on your web site and how many people can visit your site either at the same time or over a period of time — sometimes a combination of these. There a few who don’t have these limitations but they may lack the more advanced features like database and scripting support. You may also have limited access to your site. Some only let you publish your files through a proprietary interface or through their site-building tools. Continue reading →