Are you looking to build your own website and manage it? If you are at least a bit computer and internet savvy, then this task is not all that difficult at all.

First and foremost you want a website built. This can be quickly done with a WYSIWYG editor as described in my other post “build your own website offline.”

When you build your own website and manage it, you want to determine the level of management you are going to understand with your website. If it a simple website (ie. information website, hobby sites, personal websites), then build your own website and manage it is simply no much more than backing up your website periodically. If your website does not change often, then perform backups when website is change. You want to back up your website files on your local hard drive as well as on a disk/CD for permanent storage.

Backing up your website is important because 1) you never know if the webserver is going to crap out 2) you never know if the server administrator is ever going to screw it up for you 3) you never know if YOU ever screws up your own website when modifying it.

When you have a rather large and complicated website (ie. online catalog, online store websites, database websites) then you would want to perform periodic backups and this can be done usually via a control panel that comes with your web hosting account, such as cPanel, NetAdmin or other variants. You may also go into your control panel and set up a task to periodically back up the website for you. For websites that use databases you will also want to back up the databases.

Another thing to watch out for is space and bandwidth usage. With most web hosts you are allocated certain hard disk space and bandwidth. Nowadays web hosts are very generous with disk space and bandwidth limitations, but if you are running out of disk space or bandwidth allocated to you, you may want to look into why that is happening if you are not adding more web pages or contents to your website. It could be that your traffic is growing and that is a good thing. If the latter is the case, then you may want ask for an upgrade or allowance on your bandwidth.

If you have a large network of websites or a website that needs dedicated hard drive and bandwidth, eventually you will want to get your own dedicated server. Dedicated server should cost you around $100/month and the management of it is more involved than if you have a hosting account with another dedicated server or reseller.

Tags: Internet Tips & Tricks