Building Your Own Membership Site - It’s Hosting Time
Once you get to this point it is time to start thinking about domains and hosting. You’re probably starting to wonder (or worry) about membership scripts, JV partners and a whole lot of other things, so just slow down a little and let’s look at the logic of the process. Sure, you need a script and there is a relationship between the script and the hosting account. Mainly that each script has specific requirements as far as the capabilities of your web hosting account goes.
Rather than trying to work out which host works with most scripts, I’m going to make a single recommendation based on my own experience. The host I recommend is HostGator simply because I know that their hosting accounts have everything you need to use just about any script out there. I’ve not yet come across any scripts that won’t run with Hostgator. This includes aMember, Launch Formula Marketing, Butterfly Marketing and pretty well any PHP membership script. Their prices are very competitive and you have the option to upgrade to a dedicated server if your site becomes extremely popular and needs the extra resources that a dedicated server provides.
The two main types of server are shared servers and dedicated servers. With a shared server, your site is one of many on a web server. With a dedicated server you don’t share with any other sites … you have the whole server to yourself. There is a big difference in cost with shared hosting costing around $10 per month and dedicated servers costing around $100 per month. Unless you are expecting to have thousands of members in your first few weeks you will be fine with a shared server.
You will find that most membership scripts require PHP version 4.x, MySQL version 4.x, and the ability to communicate with payment processors such as Paypal. Whilst most hosts provide all of this, some make it a little more difficulat than others. GoDaddy for example doesn’t allow you to connect directly to payPal. You have to use a programming library called ‘cURL’ *and* you then have to go through a special proxy server rather than directly to PayPal. This type of thing provides extra headaches that none of us need.
If you go with HostGator you can be 99.99% sure that the installation and configuration of your membership script will go very smoothly.
I mentioned JV partners earlier. the reason why I don’t think it is time to start looking yet is because if you want to attract some good partners you need to have something attractive to show them first! There’s no point in just saying ‘hey, I have this great site I’m going to set up’. Nope, you have to be able to *show* them your great site.
Getting back to hosting … you will also need a domain of course. You may already have one. If not, you can register a domain when you sign up for your hosting account. The thing to keep in mind when choosing your domain is that you will rank better in the search engines if you can get a domain name that relates to the topic of your site, and more specifically a search term that people use when looking for your site. For example, if your site was about scrapbooking you would be looking for names that contain the word ’scrapbooking’. Something like ’scrapbookingtips.com’ would be ideal. This may not be easy as many domain names are already registered, but think about variations. If you can’t get scrapbookingtips.com … try for scrapbooking-tips.com. That dash isn’t going to make much (if any) of a difference to the search engines.
That pretty much covers the hosting. If you decide not to follow my recommendation, be very careful and make sure that you choose a web hosting company that provides everything you will need for the membership script you decide to use.
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