Hosting Pitfalls to Avoid

About Domain Name Registration

About Website Hosting

Building/Managing Your Website

If you have never had your own domain or registered a domain name, here's a brief overview of the steps to take and a few other things that you may want to know before you consider starting your own website:

1- In order to have your website hosted, you must first have your own Domain Name. If you already have a registered domain name, then you can skip to paragraph 3. All domain names must be unique. If you already have a name in mind, you can go Here and just enter the domain name you want into the search box. A search will be done for you, and you will be told whether somebody else already has your name registered or if it is open for you to register.

2- If your domain name is available for registration, then you will see a link on the page that will take you to our Domain Name Order Form where you can have us register your name right away. If the name is already taken by someone else, you can just go back and try again with another name. You might also try altering the spelling a bit, then do another search. If for instance, you wanted "coolsite.com" and it is taken, you may find that "coolsite.net" or "coolsite.org" or "cool-site.com" is available for you to register.

3- As soon as you register your domain name, or if you already have one registered, you can go Here to choose which hosting plan will best suit your needs.

Hosting Pitfalls to Avoid

Too many hosting companies-- especially the ones advertising low prices along with "unlimited" anything-- are not nearly as good a bargain as they may seem to novices. Here are a few things to watch for:

Be sure you are getting what you pay for: some hosts have fantastic ads like "5 Gb Disk Space for $1.99/month", "unlimited email" for example. In reality they may very likely have your site on a server that is jam-packed with actual room for only 10 Mb or so for each site.

The truth is that Hosting servers of quality do not come cheap. Rest assured that if you fall for any extravagant claims by a host, you will most certainly be looking to move your website to better accomodations pretty soon. Sitebilder guarantees your website space to be dedicated... i.e., you will get exactly the space you see listed and that you expect to get, no overcrowding or shady claims.

Another gimmick is to advertise domain name registration for as little as $1.99 a year or thereabout. If you fall for that, just be sure that your domain name is really yours, and also look for the small print, especially their renewal rate after the first year expires... enough said. With Sitebilder your name will be registered with you as the owner and Sitebilder as Administrative and Technical contact, unless you feel you can handle the Admin and Technical stuff yourself.

Beware of overblown claims as to the amount of bandwidth you will get; bandwidth has to be paid for. The term "available bandwidth" does not guarantee you anything. Again, be wary of any "unlimited" claims. As a rule of thumb you can figure that a monthly bandwidth allotment such as that with even our Budget Plan will give you about 100,000 hits-- that's a lot of traffic.

Don't be roped in by insincere claims.

About Website Hosting

As soon as you order your hosting plan, we will go right to work to set up your website on a server. This usually takes just a few hours, and you will be sent an email with a link to your new web site! The email will have all of the information that you will need to access your domain, and you can then begin the uploading of your files, and start the building of your site!

Whether you are transferring a domain name or registering a new one, it will usually take about a day for the name to "resolve" throughout the internet. Until the name is resolved, we will give you an IP address that you can use to link to your website and access it fully.

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Building Your Website

Getting your website hosted on the world wide web is the easy part of your project; all the myriad technical details are taken care of for you by our staff. However, it needs to be said here that web hosting is just that-- web hosting, not web design or management, and it can involve no small amount of effort on your part to build a website that you will be satisfied with and be proud of. Many who are new to the things of the internet mistakenly think that it's a simple matter to have a website registered and hosted, and think no further than that; the truth is, it will take some learning and effort on your part... this is the way of the web. After you have registered your domain name and have signed up for your Hosting Plan, then the job of website building can begin.

While any hosting company is responsible for keeping your website online and accessible to the general public on the internet worldwide, the design and management of your website is not a part of hosting and is done by either you, or by a professional designer/manager that you may hire. Hosting that includes website design and management is referred to as Managed Hosting, and is usually handled by a Design and Management service, such as our professional Design & Management department. Managed hosting can be expensive, however, and is usually only purchased by businesses. While we do provide website Open Source CMS (Content Management System) packages for self-installation free of charge for all but the Budget hosting plans, we do not provide any support for these packages; if you want us to install a package for you, there will be no added fee. CMS is designed specifically for people who do not know how to code their own dynamic websites, and support for these CMS packages is provided by the publishers or promoters of the particular CMS package involved. Again, website design, management or consulting is a wholly separate issue from web hosting.

Our Website Design department has labored to provide many free tutorials for you here, to help you build your site on a budget. Lessons include basic beginning HTML, writing your own JavaScripts and using CSS Stylesheets. The basic HTML tutorials alone can enable you to build a very smart looking website, with just a little sustained effort.

Many domain owners learn the ropes and do the website work themselves, while others feel the need to hire a professional Designer to build their site for them; it's a matter of either economics or personal choice. Some folks have their website built for them and then they manage and maintain it themselves, while others may opt to have their websites designed, managed and maintained professionally. You may sign up for one of our professional Design and/or Management solutions if you don't feel you want to do all the work yourself. By having us design your website, you will get your website hosted for free for the first full year. If you choose to have us also manage and maintain your site, you get free hosting for as long as we continue to manage it. What this will amount to in terms of price can vary considerably, and will depend entirely on the complexity of the website that you need.

While the vast majority of our new clients are honest and respectable individuals, we do occasionally get an unscrupulous character, and of course we must take steps to protect ourselves. For example, if an opportunist orders a plan from us that includes free setup and free domain registration and then cancels the account immediately upon registration of the domain for no good reason, we lose the amount we paid for the domain and the setup fees, not to mention the wasted time in record keeping and other related items. Since Sitebilder also hosts public service, non-profit accounts either at cost or for free, our "profit margin" remains very near to breaking even; you can see why we can not afford to fall victim to the occasional "opportunist". We register only Top Level Domains (TLDs), and we sell them at our own cost. We have been hosting websites since 1999, we are very stable, and we are not the run of the mill, overly amitious hosting company that is trying to "set the world on fire"; we make no claims that we do not fulfill, and our main objective is to have a good relationship with good clients, and to give those clients good, dependale and honest service. To expand on this, you may be interested in the section right above this one, "Hosting Pitfalls to Avoid".