How to publish website online

I don't want to judge on the quality of the Web hosting services you are thinking about; I think we should not promote or discourage the use of any commercial services on this site.

I simply can explain how a reasonable Web hosting plan should look for a user. Basically, all the detail of deployment should be discussed with the service provider, first of all, through the company customer services. You need to read all the documentation you are interesting in (the quality of this documentation is one of the criteria for selecting the service) and than discuss all problems you may see with the customer service representative. Again, the quality of this help is also one of the criteria for selecting the service.

In all cases, you are supposed to get a FTP access to you site, and this FTP account should be the main way of deployment. If such feature is missing, never consider such service. Everything else should be set up via one of the Web-based control panels such as cPanel or Plesk:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPanel[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plesk[^].

Using the control panel, you set up such things as e-mail accounts, user's password-protected or anonymous FTP accounts (if such feature is available), databases and other features, often including the use of some pre-installed applications or frameworks (such as forums, albums, etc.). The hosting provider usually offers at least one domain name. The support of HTTPS requires server-side certificate, possibly issued by a certificate authority and is usually provided of more advanced plans or for separate optional payment.

You should consider such features as FTP account, number of e-mail, subdomains, password-protected directories maximum volume and bandwidth, average uptime. I would advice to stay away from services trying to sell "advanced site builders", "build your new site in minutes" and the like. Instead, you really need maximum freedom and manual GUI-less hassle-free access to your site (FTP).

One of the most important features is try-before-you-buy. Providers usually offers some trial period, and the payment is either required and the many return is promised (some users reported problems of getting money back from some providers, just keep it in mind), but ideally you pay nothing in advance and use the service for free (some features could be limited) for a while before you decide to get payed service.

—SA