USA ♥ Contests

2017 Sweepstakes, Contests & Deals

A frequently-asked question:

I want to start my own website. I have an idea but it will probably take me a month or two to complete the website. Do I need hosting just to create the website prior to publishing it to the web? In other words, can i just buy the domain only and work on but not publish it?

If I am not going to publish the website for a few months there is no point in paying for hosting in that time.


Answer: You are not alone. Free hosting will not be the best hosting for most. Web hosting is the heart of your business and can mean the life or death to your business.

Before we answer your question, let us review the 7 factors to look for in a good web hosting. An excellent hosting:

  1. has excellent support and rated at least A+ by Better Business Bureau (BBB),
  2. gives unlimited storage,
  3. offers unlimited bandwidth,
  4. gives unlimited add-on domains,
  5. has easy Site Builder,
  6. has Fantastico and QuickInstall to quickly install apps like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, OSCommerce, ZenCart and more
  7. can be easily upgraded to VPS or one of their best dedicated server plans if and when your business require.

To answer your question, why not try Hostgator. If you are building your first website and needs a hosting plan, experts usually highly recommend going with Hostgator because they are the best cheap cpanel hosting around.

What if you find out that Hostgator sucks after you signed up with them? HG has 45 days, longer-than-industry-average money back guarantee so you have ample time to test them out. They are rated A+ by Better Business Bureau which shows their commitment to customer satisfaction. You also do not have to pay for the first month. You can just try their fully functional hosting service – you pay only $0.01 (you need to use the special coupon code). Do you know any other hosting company that can give you that kind of assurance? Anybody can grab an account from Hostgator for almost FREE.

How to Get an Unlimited Hosting Plan for Only 1 Cent

Click the coupon below try Hostgator cPanel hosting for almost free. If you already know that Hostgator is what you want, you can even save 25% off the normal price with the Hostgator coupon 2016 below.

Who Should Not Try Hostgator

To be honest, no web hosting service is perfect. Drawback of Hostgator includes:

  1. No free domain name – but you can easily get a domain name from the best domain registrar such as Godaddy or Namecheap for $10 or less. Would you agree that a website is not complete without a domain name?
  2. You need to pay full price after your first invoice – well, they need to make money too and all the support and great service do come with a cost

If you are still not sure if HG is right for you, or you have specific query about anything at all, try the Live Chat at HG. They are fast and knowledgeable. Just shoot them some questions before you decide.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. No, it doesn’t work that way unfortunately. You can buy the domain name, but you can’t work on your site – using the domain name – without a hosting account. A domain name is like a street address whereas the hosting account is the plot of land where you build the house (your website) at that address. You can have the address, but if you don’t have the land to build on, you can’t do anything in or at your non-existing house yet.

    Knowing from experience that you can be delayed in launching your site, it’s a good idea not to pay for hosting until you’re ready to use it unless you have the extra income. Even then, it’s a waste.

    One solution:

    You can setup a server on your computer. If you’re familiar with installing things & somewhat technically-minded, it’s relatively easy with xampp: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/index.html

    I have this on my laptop for script development, and I’ve used it on WinXP, Win7 32 &64bit without issue. Once it’s installed & running, you just create a folder in the htdocs folder for your site (the easiest way), which will be accessed at http://localhost/yourwebsitefolder/. You’ll have to use relative paths for files, images, etc, but you can design your whole site locally & have it work just like it will once you have a hosting account with your own domain name. If you run Skype, there will be a conflict with ports, but you can Google a solution for the xampp skype conflict, which is just a setting in Skype that needs to change.

    You could also try your hand with free hosting providers, but the problem there is that most of them aren’t designed to be a temporary development point for websites… they don’t give you the freedom to build your site as you want to & be able to just download the HTML / CSS, etc files when you’re ready to move to paid hosting. However, maybe Google "free cpanel hosting" – if you find a free hosting provider giving you access to cpanel (a website hosting account control panel), that should give you the freedom to develop your site & download the HTML files when you’re ready to move on.

    If none of this will work, if you have some marketing friends, see if any of them have a reseller account & will offer you some free diskspace & a free subdomain on some domain of theirs. Most should be able to give you dedicated access to a control panel. As long as you don’t install rogue scripts on your site, the impact should be negligible & most resellers I know (who use their reseller account for their own sites, not reselling), have plenty of disk space & bandwidth to spare.

    I really recommend xampp if you can do it though – it’s very, very useful.