Hosting yourself on free hosting (on a subdomain) isn’t enough now – it makes people think that you’re not truly invested in your site, and extends the length of your domain name to possibly unmemorable lengths.

So what can you do?

• Choose a domain – choose a domain that has a strong tie to the project you have in mind, either via branding or some other keyword link.  There’s no point in calling a tie site ‘bricks and dirt’.com, equally, a stunt riders site would probably not be called ‘the silk cravat.com’
• Choose relaible hosting – you can’t call hosting that is free ‘reliable’ because at some point, they’re going to close out your bandwidth – equally, relying on free sites means you’re probably going to struggle to put up a blog or other PHP based system on most ‘free’ hosting sites.
  Choosing your hosting can be fairly complex, so give yourself time to properly evaluate the hosts – it’s almost like choosing to move into a block of flats – you might never get to see your neighbours, but you’re going to hate it if there’s a structural or space problem.
• Once you’ve chosen your host, set up carefully – don’t rush into building a site only to tear it down when you discover there’s an easier way to do it.  By far and away, most people find that building with a CMS or blogging software gives them the flexibility they need, with an easily changed ‘template’ (like redecorating that flat)
  WordPress acts as both a CMS and blog now, so comes highly recommended in the community for beginners and the more advanced coders.
• You’re set up – now what?  Well – you launch!  Launching your site can be a big affair, with press releases, and more, or it can be a smaller thing, with careful promotion on social networking sites – don’t forget your email siglines and other areas you get to provide links (such as forums!).
• And beyond?  The fifth step is whatever you want it to be.  By the time most people have thier first site up, they’ve discovered a myriad of ways to make thier way in the online world, so there’s no right, or wrong way to launch (as long as you’re not spamming people of course!)  Find ways to modify your tactics to create great ways to launch, and create sites that compell people.  And remember, your site is only as successful as you make it, so push it out there.

In most cases, people moving to dedicated servers do so because they own one, or more sites, that can’t cope under the pressure of traffic or memory useage – so consider whether it will get worse – upgrading your own server account is easy, granted, but it can sometimes result in unwanted downtime and additional expense that you may be able to avoid in the short term.  So if you’re not sure, ask your server tech (or upcoming server techs if you’re moving companies) to talk you through the process and work out what you can do to make it as easy as possible to move.

Most server companies offer extensive documentation on thier moving process (you can see ours here) so research where your site will be moving to and ensure that you’re comfortable with the move itself.  Once you are, find out about any garunatees and make sure you have a back up of your data – just in case.

Backing up your server is also a must – there’s nothing worse than discovering that your server hardware has failed and that the sites you’ve been hosting are gone.

We (currently) own three servers – two virtual boxes and a seperate, smaller account at another company.
I’ve been asked several times in the past why we’d do this and thought I’d explain the logic behind it.

More servers= more stability

Our server offerings allow us to provide more stability and a range of products.  It also means if the unthinkable happens, we can give you temporary space on another server till we can get you back up and running – and in some cases, we can even facilitate copying the data, since we’ve added an award winning backup system to our servers in recent months.