You want a website. In that case you need to find a company that provides space on a shared Server computer at their facility. This is called an Internet host. There are many out there and they offer many different packages that you could buy. It will be a subscription, usually with a small downpayment.

I recommend Host Rocket since I've used them for years and feel like you could not find a better deal. Since I will be illustrating this with screen shots from Hostrocket, it might be better to use them as host. We all have our favorites, but this site is devoted to showing you one pathway that works.

Even the ads don't do justice to Hostrocket's actual offers. If you pay for two years up front, they offer $5 a month and 25 Gigs of space. That particular sale may go away. But the point is that there is a range of products and you should choose one that is best for you.

Some hosts don't offer all the tools that you may need. The main things you need are

• Enough space on the hard drive to hold your site,
• Enough bandwidth to support your activity.
• mail
• databases - mySQL is preferred.
• And support for PHP scripts.

How much space do you need? We can only estimate and then you should double or triple that to be safe. In reality, you can get more space than most people will ever need. Consider these situations and their estimated file sizes:

• A few simple HTML pages on the web ------ 0.05 megabytes
• ten pages with twenty big pictures ------------- 0.20 megabytes
• A Wordpress installation without content ---- 15.0 megabytes
• A Joomla installation without content --------- 30.0 megabytes

When you add content that could increase from 1 megabyte to some unlimited amount.. As you can see even 1 Gigabyte ( 1000 megabytes) is a LOT of space. And most hosts offer 1 to 25 Gigabytes. It is ALWAYS better to have more space than you think you will ever need.

Bandwidth is harder to define. It is the measure of how much data will be downloaded by the site users each month. If you have a few web pages, a few articles, a few pictures then it will be inconsequential. But if you have large files that are very popular, the web site will need more bandwidth. I have a 70 meg file and a 50 meg file that have been very popular and it would have shut my website down if I had not had unlimited bandwidth on the site. Or rather my host would have shut it down due to the large volume of data that was being used.

Consider that once you have this hosted site, you can add more sites under it. On Host Rocket, and on other hosts, they are offering additional domain name slots. Host Rocket offers 8 additional slots. This means that you can purchase one host and then open up to 8 more web sites on that same space. See how you could need more hard disk space than you thought? So the 25 Gigabytes size is not unreasonable if you have plans for more than one site.

Host Rocket offers very professional sites. You might be able to find something cheaper with less space and fewer bells and whistles. But you should be careful that the other host provides all the features you need.