Web-hosting
Now what you need to look for is what services you need. Are you going to serve just HTML-pages, or dynamic content with php, asp or jsp.
What access do you want? Only a web-interface, or also ftp-access? Or perhaps ssh-access?
Do you need a database or not?
Another major part you need to look for is traffic, your site is going to use a certain amount of traffic. Now most providers give you 5, 10, 30 GB traffic a month but there are also providers that give unlimited amounts of traffic (Fair use).First decision to make is what service to choose:
- virtual-server
- Virtual Private hosting (VPS)
- dedicated-server
- dedicated connection
- Co-location
- Content Management system (CMS)
What's the big difference ?
A dedicated server is a complete computer for yourself. Advantage: more security, a lot of diskspace, you don't have to share CPU-time, the bandwidth can't be absorbed by other websites.
With a virtual-server you "share" one computer with more websites (up to a few hundred). Advantage: its a lot cheaper then dedicated servers.Dedicated connection and co-location lets you take a lot more responsibility.
With dedicated connection you get a connection (ISDN, cable, T1) to your house (office), but you need your own computer to act as server. You have physical access to you machine but there also a series of negative sides, power-outage, floods, ...
You can also set you computer at your ISP(Internet Service Provider), this is called co-location. The benefit is that your computer is at a secure place, high speed connection. But that place can be far away, and they don't do anything on your computer, maybe re-booting(reset) but that's it.Content Management system (CMS) like Wordpress and Drupal is for the user knows nothing about programming HTML or any other language, and just wat to put some text online.
The CMS does all the hard part for you. you can create a website like you write a page in word or another texteditor.