If you're new to internet marketing and you are looking at setting up your own website, you'll see there are a whole heap of providers out there.

You may have heard of GoDaddy; one of the biggest and best-known providers on the market. They offer good prices and claim over 8 million users. Recognised by the industry as a leader in the fight against online fraud such as phishing, and against spam, GoDaddy can be seen as a safe bet when looking for a provider. If you are considering your own site you will be looking at setting up Wordpress - GoDaddy offers support for MySQL and PHP, but do choose the Linux hosting option for PHP to work.

Alternatively, you may wish to consider Hostgator. Also offering competitive prices, they advertise unlimited disk space, bandwidth and guarantee 99.9 percent uptime. Hostgator also use the popular cPanel interface which is specifcally designed to make the entire process of hosting a website that much easier. Of course hostgator also supports PHP and MySQL, for when your Wordpress masterpiece is ready. :)

Whichever you choose to go with (and there are many more out there besides the two I mentioned) do make sure they offer all the features you need; for instance not every provider offers PHP support out of the box. Also, if you were considering a bespoke content management system for your website, that system may not allow you to use your own server-side code and you may be forced to work with what they offer. You may also not like the interface on some CMS systems.

A couple of years ago I worked alongside some colleagues who were agents for one popular CMS, now owned by one of the biggest technology companies in the world. Although it was powerful, and great for someone who just wants a website out of the box, it wasn't long before I found the system too restrictive to work with for my marketing purposes. For instance, it did not support PHP, and the interface was difficult to work with; it was designed to resemble Microsoft Word and only provided a small window in which to enter content or code. The CMS was meant to be an all-in-one solution, and it was a tough sell to small businesses who may already have some parts working and were understandably reluctant to throw all that out in favour of a completely new setup.

For these reasons I have changed to using Wordpress myself; the system is remarkably straightforward to set up and there are all manner of 'plugins' you can obtain (free) which vastly increase the functionality. For a marketer such as myself, Wordpress fits the bill far better than a hosted CMS which may be more orientated towards an actual online store. Wordpress's roots are in blogging, and as any internet marketer will tell you, content is king. Frequently updating content is vital and the SEO-friendly nature of Wordpress makes it more suitable for this business.

But - I'm getting ahead of myself. To have a site, first you need a provider. Either of the two I suggested will suit the new internet marketer (or you can do your own investigations) and Ishall provide links to both GoDaddy and Hostgator here:

Link to GoDaddy website

Link to Hostgator website