For my mission critical sites, and those of my clients, I manage an Australian reseller account, which gives me greatest control over the hosting environement.

For my recreational and pro-bono sites, I use Bluehost.

Why choose Bluehost?

I have found Bluehost to be very reliable over the past few years.  Reliablility on the web comes down to how infrequently the host server ‘goes down’ or becomes unavailable.  Many hosts boast 99.9% uptime, but often this is an optimistic figure.

Bluehost satisfies all the basic requirements for the setup I advocate:

• Provides PHP, and MySQL (required for Wordpress)
• Fantastico Wordpress installer (completes a vanilla install of wordpress in about 4 minutes!)
• Unlimited Addon domains (you can host multiple different sites with different domain names for the one cost)
• Unlimited Subdomains (you can create subdomain1.mysite.com.au)

I monitor my sites using free independant monitoring services, so I am comfortable recommending Bluehost as an entry level setup.

Essentially, you’ll need:

• A domain name – this is the equivalent of your business name online.  It is the link that users type in to their browser to visit your site, also called a URL (Universal Resource Locator)
• A web host – To make your website available 24 hours a day, it needs to be hosted on a commercial server with a reliable connection to the net.  You might think of it as the stable which houses your thoroughbred website!

These two items are ongoing expenses which are required to make your site available to your customers.  Once you’ve got these covered, you’ll also need…

• A Content Management System (CMS) – of course there are many ways of publishing on the net, but by far the simplest (and most effective) is using a free CMS such as Wordpress.  It takes care of the technicalities of publishing your material, leaving you to concentrate on marketing your product.
• A theme: this is the ‘look and feel’ of your site, and might be an ‘off-the-shelf’ template for free or at a premium, or it might be custom designed by your webdesigner.

You need content.

If you’ve got all of the above, and nothing more, there’ll be nought to see; if you’ve already got content, you need more!

Google drives traffic to active websites, so it is important to keep your site ‘fresh’.  Most folk seem to think that this is the easy part, and from a technical standpoint, they’re right!  It takes some time to write the material for a website, though, so some web publishing coaching can be really helpful.