Awesome sauce! So for this series I decided to use a real life example to teach everyone the ins and outs of real world web design. In this article I will be focusing on starting the journey and getting your hosting situation lined up..

Alright Alright Alright.. So your sitting at home watching season 2 of Lost on Netflix when you get a new message in your in-box.. That client of yours has agreed to your bid and wants you to start right away. First, its time to find a host.

With WordPress there are a few things that are a MUST.My list later will have hosts that will meet your needs.

First and foremost is that it offers PHP. PHP is the programing language on which many many websites and technologies are based on. Riding with that is MySQL which is the type of database WordPress runs on. It is best to find a host that offers to most recent versions of both. WordPress likes to go on the latest and greatest when developing and its important you have a host that does as well.

Second is storage, you may find a host that has a great deal at $2.95 a month, but only offers 5GB of storage.. I dont know about you but my iPhone has more than that.

Third is transfer or bandwidth. Many Many Many of your hosts will tell you that its “unlimited” and this is a lie. Sure if your site is small it wont really matter, but say it gets huge.. I’m talking 2,000 members, over 500 hits an hour huge. What you don’t know is that your site is apart of a group of sites hosted on the same server. This lets the hosting company offer you such a cheap rate, your on the same server as 200 other sites. When your site starts pulling large number of hits you start eating up resources and processor time, this in turn hurts everyone on your server. Your host will then start “migrating” resources from your site, and now your site is taking longer to load and tada! crash.. Or your site will crash the entire server, and you’ll suddenly start incurring fees for crashing and over allocating resources. Maybe this wont effect the smaller sites, but you should know that its a possibility. For this series it wont be trouble.

So here’s the top hosts and what I think of them:

Fat Cow – Super good prices, everything you’ll need. Says it comes with a free domain for life, but I wonder about that one..  They get mixed reviews..

LunarPages – SUPER large host.. Prices are a bit high, but in my opinion are worth it. I got hacked once and they spotted it and took care of it fast. They have super customer support and always have been great.

HostGator- A regular host, good, mid level. They offer different options mostly different payment plans. Right now they are who I’m with, but thats more of a convience..

Your biggest concerns will be price, uptime, and reliability. I have hardly ever needed support for anything, Lunarpages and hostgator have been there for me both times..

When you pick a host, you will most likely register your domain at the same time. You might want to look into a domain registration outside of your host, and have it direct to your new host. This is so in the event you want to terminate your hosting agreement, you can easily move your domain. With that said I have never done that for myself, but I have done it for clients.

You will spend most of your time looking for a domain name that hasn’t been registerd yet. Good luck. Its assumed that all 3 and 4 letter combinations have been registered. What you have to look out for are those that buy domain names in bulk. There are folks with hundreds of thousands of domain names. Sometimes its not so bad to buy the name you want if its registered. I once bought a site name for $500. But also a site was registered for a trademarked name of mine (desopolis.com) and held ransom for $5,000. I threatened to sue, but that only go so far before I gave up.

Once your name is set up its really straight forward. Once your done registering you’ll get an email (and in the case of lunarPages, a phone call) to finish your set up.

It will hold your master access name and password, and a brief on your specific hosts methods of access and what not. It will take a week or so for the rest of the internet to recognize your domain name and direct to your host, so in the meantime they will usually give you a IP address.

You can access the server through the control panel(cPanel in most cases) or through FTP. For this primer I will be using FTP on a Windows machine, with some notes on MAC’s as I try them out on campus.

From there its simple uploading and access.

With wordpress its very, very simple to get up and running.

cPanel is where you will access your e-mail accounts, all administrative features, MySQL and more features than even I know what to do with.

And that’s about it for hosting! Arnt you excited!! If its for a client Its best advised to let them know of all these details in your bid, and quickly choose a host to fit the needs of your client. With our client we will be testing live on my site, so I wont be registering a domain or a host, but since I already have one its no biggy. if you have any questions or concerns please comment and let me know!!