Webhosting

If you’ve got or are considering a web hosting account with PHP and mySQL support, you’ll find a wealth of free programs and scripts to take advantage of their powerful combined capabilities.

Web hosting providers, from free to pricey, have always included some free pre-installed scripts to their customers in the way of guest books, counters and calendars. If you’re shopping around now, though, you’ll find that the toys and bells and whistles that you can install on your web pages include hundreds of scripts and applications. You can set up one of dozens of forums, choose from many image galleries and photo albums, and serve classified ads, offer auction listings and dating services – in short, just about anything at all that you can do on the Internet, you can do with a free PHP script from your web hosting provider.

One of the best free services to look for is Fantastico, a web-based script installer that allows you to add any of dozens of free goodies to your web site with just the click of a mouse. If your web hosting provider offers Fantastico with its hosting accounts, you’ve got access to over a dozen different content management systems, half a dozen user forums, several different blog packages, shopping carts, including Zen Cart and OS Commerce, an easy FAQ maker and six different customer support options so that you can offer help and support on your web site.

Two of the handiest types of free tools that many web hosting companies offer for free are:

Portals and Content Management Systems

Content management systems make it easy for you to add and remove pages and information to and from your web site. Most include modules that let you add discussion boards, shopping carts, polls and instant messaging, as well as user authentication and security to your web site easily. Among the content management systems that your web hosting company may offer for free are Mambo, Post-Nuke, Xoops and Drupal. All are open source software with a lot of user support beyond the support offered by your web hosting company, so there are always new modules and new tricks being offered for all of them.

Blogs

Blogs are online publishing tools that make it easy to update your website as often as you like. They automatically put the latest entries up and move older entries down in the reading queue. One of the most commonly used is WordPress, which many web hosting providers include as a free setup script with your web hosting account.

To view our recommended web hosts, visit, Recommended Web Hosting Companies.

Carrie Reeder is the owner of eZerk, an informational website, with articles and the latest news about various topics.

If you’re looking for a professionally designed web site at cheap, bargain basement prices, you may find it as close as your web hosting provider. Many companies that host web sites also offer web design services to their customers at low prices. Some of the best deals to look out for are:

Cheap, Cheap, Cheap – Free Custom Web Site Design with a Year of Hosting

You’ll have to shop around for one, but there are a number of web hosting companies that offer a free, professionally designed web site if you pay for a year’s hosting in advance, and agree to allow their intern – who does the design – to use your site in his or her portfolio. If the web host is otherwise satisfactory, you could get a $300-500 professional web site design for absolutely nothing.

Cheap Custom Web Site Design for Non-Profits

If you’re a non-profit agency, quite a few web hosting services offer a limited amount of free web site design and a discounted web hosting rate designed especially for you. Even better, if you shop around locally, you could find a web hosting service in your community that will host your web site for free.

Cheap Web Hosting and Design Services For One Low Price

Again, a little shopping around can pay off for you in cheap web hosting and design services, especially if you’re building a business web site. There are several web hosting services that offer all-in-one design and hosting services starting at $9.95 a month for a one page business card site to $50 a month for a 9-10 page full service catalog. Some require a commitment of 12-24 months, though they’ll only bill you the monthly fee up front, and all require that if you leave their web hosting service, the site design belongs to them.

If the web hosting company is otherwise dependable, reliable and offers all the bells and whistles that you need, an all-in-one package can be a great way to get a professional design at cheap rates.

Pick a Web Hosting Company That Offers Flexible Templates for Building

You can’t get much cheaper than build it yourself – and web hosting that offers good, flexible design templates makes building it yourself as easy as clicking on options. There are a lot of web hosting companies that offer web site builders and templates – so shop around for the best, most reliable host you can find.

To view our recommended sources for these web hosting online or to read more articles about web hosting, visit: Recommended Web Hosting Resources Online.

Carrie Reeder is the owner of eZerk, an informational website about various topics with articles and the latest news.