We are working on a series called 'Starting your first website'. This article will focus on hosting the new website.

Hosting to most of my clients is intimidating and most don't know where to begin. When you are starting a new website you need to answer a few questions.

1) What is the website about? Is it about luxury homes, general real estate, commercial property. This should deterimine your domain.

2) Perform your keyword research and decide on a domain name as we discussed in the last article. Purchase the domain. You will need to change the 'Name Servers to point to your hosting account' when it is complete.

3) Do you want to maintain it yourself? This will determine where you want to host the site. If you want to do your own work, then in most cases you will want to find a hosting plan that has a built in website editor. In these you have very little flexibilty over the design of the site and you will be choosing from pre-built templates. When you purchase an account you need to find the 'Name Server' addresses and go back to your domain registry and plug in the name servers. There are many hosting companies to choose from. Yahoo, GoDaddy, Pair.com. Do a search for hosting plans. You want to choose a plan with a unique IP address for your new account. Their tech support can answer this question. These will cost between $60 and $300 per year. Don't get suckered into buying extras, like directory submissions and SEO, Most of the extras are worthless. You want a domain and basic hosting. I also prefer Linux hosting servers over Windows servers.

4) If you don't want to maintain it yourself, you must determine how many pages you want on your site. You can count on an average site costing between $175 and $300 per page to build. For example, the basic Hosting Plan of Pearl Real Estate Marketing is a design fee of $175 per page. This includes your first year of hosting, email and three hours of additonal changes throughout the year. Then we charge a $300 annual renewal few. In this plan we take care of everything for you. You don't have to learn the name servers or how to setup a database or email management. On our main website we have the Huntsville MLS, this can be added very easily to your site from your MLS provider. From here you will have to find a service provider to take care of your needs.

Your situation will determine the way you need to go. If you have more time than money you may want to learn to do it yourself. If you don't have time you could be have a website beginning around $600 and have it managed for you.