This is the least exciting of the web site building posts, and arguably the most important. If you think of a website as an order of eggs benedict, hosting is the english muffin. It’s not sexy, or attractive, and you barely see it under all the delicious stuff, but without it you’re left with a floppy egg, a random piece of canadian bacon and a pool of sauce (that analogy kind of fell apart at the end… sorry).

Hosting

This should be your first step. (Actually, planning should be your first step, but we’ll come back to that). In it’s simplest terms, a website is a bunch of pictures and files. Those pictures and files need to live somewhere. That’s where the host comes in. A host is basically a computer where your website files live. It’s connected to the internet, and there’s some fancy computer stuff that happens when people type your address to make sure the right files show up.

Hosting for a simple website should run anywhere from $5 a month to $20 a month. You’re paying for storage capacity and features. A small organization could get by on less than 1gb of space, but if you’re going to have lots of videos or documents on your site you might need a bit more. Luckily storage prices continue to fall, so capacity shouldn’t be your limiting factor.

Hosts have a various levels of support and management options. If you’re relatively tech savvy, you can administer the hosting your website from a control panel. This would include creating email addresses, and making ftp accounts. You could also be managing backups, and doing some basic data management – though this is usually more complicated, and if you’ve read this far in the article – you probably shouldn’t be in charge of data backups.

If I can make one request, don’t host your site with Go Daddy. Their advertising is gross and their support is pretty much worthless. I personally use Media Temple. There’s a lot of fanboy-ism surrounding Media Temple – and most of it is well deserved. They cost about $20 a month, and that will give you as much storage space as any small->medium organization could ever use. Their support staff is great, and their control panel is one of the cleanest and easiest to use I’ve seen. Dreamhost is another popular provider, equally easy to use and supportive. There are also many smaller companies that provide a great hosting service. If you can find one in your area, you might get even better personalized support. Do not host with someone that doesn’t host stuff for a living. You can host a simple website on a computer in your closet hooked up to a dial-up modem. You might be tempted to host with ‘that guy Bill, he seems nice and volunteered to host our site for us.’  If Bill isn’t a professional host, you’re going to end up with more trouble than you saved.  Even with a good host, you can expect a handful of snafus during the course of an average year and you don’t want those snafus happening while Bill is on vacation.

Things I look for in a host.

1. Is it easy to find the phone number? This simple test will weed a lot of the amateur operations out of the pool. You want to make sure you’re not signing up with some kid running a server in his folk’s basement. A good host should have a 24 hour support staff. That means when you call – even if you need to sit on hold for a while, eventually someone will answer the phone. If the phone number is buried 8 pages deep on their site – that means they don’t want you calling. Bad sign.
2. Costs should be easy to find and understand and displayed proudly on their website. If they can’t write out in simple bullet point list of what you’re going to be paying for, they’re no good. Often shadier hosts will charge crazy overage rates for storage or bandwidth (similar to cell phone providers).
3. Backups. Your host should be bragging about their data centers. If you don’t see that phrase on their website – be worried.

Bonus Points

1. Solid Email & Webmail
2. 1 Click Installers
3. Good Corporate Citizen

Insider secret: Hosting is an industry that benefits greatly from economies of scale. Providing hosting for 1 website is expensive. Providing hosting for the 1000th website is extremely cheap. What does this mean for you? You might find a local hosting provider that would donate some hosting to your organization. Note: you get what you pay for – so free isn’t always in your best interest, but hosting is something that can easily be donated by a company because there are little hard costs associated with providing it.