Web Host.
Choosing a web host is a little more difficult today than it was back in 1999 when I started producing web sites. Back then there were only a few services, all were about the same in terms of cost and they all had the same amount of up time. Bandwidth, and space were not cheap! It was a very large consideration to have a web site, if your web site became popular and received a lot of traffic, which we all hope they do, it was expensive to allow for the bandwidth (amount of hits and downloads per day) to cover the traffic. Today that is not so much the case, everyone is offering tons of space and high bandwidth rates for cheap money.
I will instill that popular phrase here, you get what you pay for. If you find cheap or free service, your visitors will undoubtedly have to deal with popup ads, cookies, banner ads, and other annoying traits of a free or cheap web presence. This to me does not speak professional website. Worse yet, if you are on a freebie site, you are not going to have your name as your domain, it will be a sub-domain of a domain. This is bad on two fronts, one you do not have your name registered so anyone could go and register it, the other is a long hard to remember name that screams un-professional to your visitors. The one thing I can tell you is you want to portray a professional tone even if you are selling garage sale items from your house. In a professional tone, those are called treasures. My point here is you want to pay for the service you need and nothing more.
There are several, countless web hosts out there, I in fact provide this same service to my clients when desired. Every web design firm or serious professional will provide a host package. You will see offers that are for $9.95 per month with unlimited space and bandwidth. If you need unlimited space and bandwidth, these may appeal to you, however most of us do not need that. In fact the web host is counting on it and most likely are over selling their space. If everyone on their server was using unlimited space and bandwidth they would crash due to the volume they were attempting to provide. Even if they offer 500 gigabyte of storage and 250 gigabyte of bandwidth, they are most likely over selling.
Over selling works like this; offer a client unlimited space for cheap, the client thinks this is a good deal and buys it. The client gets his site ready, uploads it and though he has taken as much liberty at using space as he can, his site is no more than 100 megabytes of space. After several months, perhaps he has increased it slightly to 150 megabytes, and his traffic might be 15,000 hits a day (if he is really popular for his business). So this client signed up for unlimited space, but is only using 150 megs and 15,000 hits per day, let’s say all 15,000 visitors use up all 150 megs of delivered content, for 2.25 gigs of bandwidth. Is that unlimited? No, and they counted on that when they sold you the package. In my hosting model, I pay for server space. I get enough space and bandwidth to cover my clients’ use of the space. Whatever they need I make sure they have, just like other professionals out there. That is part of my service.
So you have selected the Web Host and are ready to upload your site. The Web host will have provided you with the instructions for using the FTP process to their site. Some hosts provide application interfaces that you can sign into and upload your files through their service. If you have small web site, this might work. However, they limit your files to 10 or so per upload, so if you have a large site with a lot of files you will be better off using an actual FTP application.
Through your web host you will set up both FTP accounts, and email accounts. You can direct the email to your email application of choice, and set up your email application to pull from that server, or have the email server set up to forward the emails to one or more addresses.
Most hosts have other services you can add to a web site as well to make things a little easier than building them from scratch. I will not get into every aspect but will mention the database service. If you are managing your site yourself, you want to make sure there is good support for building a database and enough help to allow you to fill the database and retrieve, update, change the database with a supported technology such as MySQL (seems to be the most popular today). Most web hosts will have this feature, but you want to make sure.
If you are hiring a professional, such as myself, to handle your web site maintenance they should be able to handle building the database and interfaces to it however they prefer to work. You will want to make sure they have this ability. This back-end work to me is what separates the professional from the hobbyist. Most web sites do not need such work, but for those that do this is one aspect that can get complicated really fast. This is one aspect of the web design I would highly recommend seeking out a professional to handle.