Signing up with an Internet Service Provider
Sep 18, 2008 Hosting
Signing up for an Internet service provider (ISP) is the equivalent to renting space in a storage locker. When you register your domain name from a registry service, like GoDaddy, you’ll need to house your website somewhere. That’s where ISP’s come to play.
I particularly like Bluehost as my ISP because they have far more features than most hosting companies. You don’t need to be programmer or very computer savvy to use most of the features they provide. They have features like unlimited storage. That’s a huge deal when you have multiple domains being used under that account. Speaking of multiple domains, they allow you to register an unlimited amount of domains within your shared account. Most other ISP’s will make you sign up for a new account for every domain name you want to host there. With Bluehost, you can host as many as you want for that one price. Therefore, if you selected your top niche and hosted with Bluehost, it wouldn’t cost you any additional hosting fees to create other websites for your added niches. Having multiple websites on the same account may be a fear for many due to extra fees hosting companies charge for the excessive traffic. Well, no charge, unlimited data transfer as well.
There are many more features, but the one I like the best is cPanel which is short for Control Panel. Within cPanel, they have two features called Fantastico and SimpleScripts. They both do the same thing. They allow you to create things like a blog or a forum with the push of a button. You then, simply, provide a user name, password and an email account and you’re done. You don’t need to hire a programmer to install a blog or forum for your website.
I used that same feature for this site and decided to make my main page into a blog. I’ll explain why in a future post.
By default, when you register with GoDaddy, they become your hosting service. In the next post I’ll discuss how to transfer your registered domain name from there to Bluehost or to another hosting company you may choose.
Tags: Hosting, Register Domain
