Uploading Your Pages

Web pages with one of these software programs, you still have to find a site on the web to host your pages. Yahoo! GeoCities and the other home page communities offer separate page hosting services (usually for a fee), geared towards personal web pages. If you need a host for a complete website (or for small business purposes), you should probably examine a service that specializes in more sophisticated website hosting.

A website hosting service will manage all aspects of your website. For a monthly fee, you'll receive a fixed amount of space on their servers, your own website address (and your own personal domain, if you want to pay for it), and a variety of site management tools. Pricing for these services typically start at $10 or so a month, and goes up from there.

The best way to look for a website host is to access a directory of hosting services. Most of these directories let you search for hosts by various parameters, including monthly cost, disk space provided, programming and platforms supported, and extra features offered. Among the best of these host search sites are the following:

• HostIndex.com (www.hostindex.com)

• HostSearch (www.hostsearch.com)

• TopHosts.com (www.tophosts.com)

• Web Hosters (www.webhosters.com)

The Absolute Minimum

Here are the key points to remember from this chapter:

• Web pages are built using the HTML programming languagealthough you don't have to know how to program to create a simple web page.

• To create a personal web page, check out one of the large page building communities, such as Yahoo! GeoCities.

• To create a more sophisticated web page or website, use a dedicated page building program, such as Microsoft FrontPage.