In this section we aim to provide you with help and information on choosing a company to host your site and what types of service there are.

There are hundreds of companies out there that will offer you website hosting to varying degrees. The purpose of a hosting company it to hold your website on one of their servers and give the world access to it. When your website has been designed, it is then transfered onto this server. You are at any time able to alter and add to your website. A hosting company will offer features with various levels of hosting.

BASIC HOSTING PACKAGE. This will be on a shared server (shared with other websites) and give ample space for most websites, in fact usually far far too much. You will have a bandwidth limit per month, this is the amount a data transfer from the server over the internet per month. 1000-3000 megabytes is plenty for most small sites. You can always upgraded your package if you reach the limit. You will get at least 1 email address. Some basic packages will offer scripting and mysql databases. These are important if you wish to add php scripts etc later on. I would recommend a host that does offer these as standard on basic packages. There may be different levels of basic hosting offered by a hosting company with more hard drive space and more bandwidth.

VIRTUAL PRIVATE SERVER HOSTING. This offers a more secure and private hosting package. Some hardware is shared on the server. It uses its own hard disk space, RAM, CPU, Dedicated IP addresses and it can be rebooted independently. Virtual Private Servers allows multiple customers to share the expense of hardware and network connections without sacrificing privacy, performance or preference. VPS Hosting provides the flexibility to add and change modules and install your own software. VPS Hosting gives you the features and functionality of a dedicated server without the cost of building and maintaining one.

DEDICATED SERVER The Dedicated Hosting environment provides an exclusive server or servers devoted solely to your website. You do not share a dedicated server with other customers, as with shared hosting. Dedicated server hosting offers full control over server operating system and enables the customers to customize hardware as well as software setup to meet exact requirements. Our Managed dedicated website hosting not only benefits a client’s IT department, but brings time, cost, and resource savings to the whole company.

Finding a good reliable host is not easy. Our advice is to choose on recommendation. Do not always go for the most features and least cost.

I would avoid www.webhosting.uk.com. The features offered are great and on the surface a good choice, but the reliability and uptime has proved to be very poor. Also their response to complaints is not acceptable. There technical support has also proved to be more prone to blaming customers for problems that are infact technical issues with their service.

Probably the cheapest company basic hosting company in UK is www.streamline.net. They offer very low cost solutions, but at a price. They support is very slow, usually taking 2 days to reply to a ticket. The hosting is reliable, but features are limited. They are not recommended if you want to run any scripts on your site.