I have done my best to write an unbiased review of each of the hosting companies. Many review pages will rank a company based on how much of a referral fee they get paid!

I’ve done a lot of research to find out the pertinent information that you need to know.

…Marie of christian-affiliate-marketing.com

Click here for a quick overview of available hosting companies.

Hostgator review:

OK, I do have to admit I have some bias in reviewing Hostgator. This is because all of my websites are hosted with Hostgator. I am a very satisfied customer! The Hostgator staff and the Hostgator Forum have helped me several times with my questions about how to start up a website. I asked some really basic newbie questions and was never laughed at. My websites have never been down and the server response time has been excellent. I highly recommend hostgator!

• Number of hosted domains: 2,200,000

• Cost: As little as $4.95/month (but you need to buy a 3 year plan). $6.95/month (a 1 year plan) gets you unlimited bandwidth and disk space.
• Server Reliability: 99.9% up time. I have never had a problem with the server not responding.
• My overall opinion: I highly recommend hostgator. If you are new and just starting out, it is very inexpensive. If you are an advanced web designer it really has everything you need. It has a great cpanel including fantastico, ruby on rails, the latest php version, mysql and more.

Do you have any experience with Hostgator Hosting?  If so, let us know what you think!

Unbiased Hosting Reviews

Did you know that most reviews of hosting companies are extremely biased?  Hosting companies will pay website owners a referral fee to send customers their way.  Therefore, often the hosting companies that are listed as the best, are actually the companies that pay the best referral fees!

I have done my best to write this review from an unbiased perspective.  The hosting companies are not listed in order of who pays me the best referral fee but instead, I have listed them in order of how many domains they currently have registered. 

Hosting Company	Review	Cost for 1 year of hosting	Server reliability	# of registered domains
	Click here for Marie's review of Hostgator	$6.95 per month for 1 site $7.95 per month for multiple domains Unlimited bandwidth and disk space	99.9% up time	>800,000 domains
	Click here for Marie's review of Bluehost Web Hosting.	$6.95 per month	99.9% up time	>800,000 domains
	Click here for Marie's review of ix Web Hosting.	$4.95 per month (basic plan) $8.95 per month (business plan)	99.99% up time	>300,000 domains hosted
	Click here for Marie's review of Web.com hosting.	$11.95 per month As low as $9.95 per month with 2 year contract	99.98% up time	>300,000 domains
	Click here for Marie's review of FatCow hosting.	$66/year which equals $5.50 per month	99.98% up time	>125,000 domains
	Click here for Marie's review of Lunarpages hosting.	$8.95 for basic plan (which is what most people will use) As low as $4.50 with a 60 month contract	99.7% up time	>99,000 domains

Ask A Vet Question - my first website

I have always wanted to create a website, but I didn’t have a clue about how to do it!  In the spring of 2009 my dreams became reality when I designed www.AskaVetQuestion.com and it is now a successful veterinary advice website.  I’m sharing my story so that it will hopefully inspire others who want to get into web design or marketing on the internet, but don’t know how to do it.

Learning html

I knew I had to have some knowledge of html programming.  (HTML is the language that web pages are usually written in).  Basic html is not hard to learn!

I found a great tutorial at about.com by Jennifer Kyrnin and signed up for an email class on learning html.  Each week I worked through the exercises and learned how to program.  It really was not hard!

Then, something really bad happened, that God used for great good!  One morning I bent over to pick up my baby and felt a pop in my back.  A few hours later my back went into total spasm.  It turned out that I had a protruding disc.  For the next 5 weeks I was restricted to bed rest.  My wonderful husband and amazing extended family looked after me, and did all the childcare and housework for the next month an a half.  And I was relegated to the couch…

The quest begins…

So here I was, on the couch with no responsibilities other than to rest.  We bought a laptop.  I decided to get serious about creating a website.  I started off by posting in a web design forum about what I wanted to do – create a website where people could ask me veterinary questions for a small fee and I could respond.

The first time I posted, I was laughed at.  I was told that with no programming experience it would be too hard.  Plus, there were already lots of sites out there so there would be too much competition for me to succeed.  Fortunately I posted in another site,  www.webdeveloper.com and was told that what I wanted to do could be done but would take some hard work.

They advised me to learn some basic programming in a language called php, a style sheet language called css, as well as a database system called mySQL.  Again, I found some great free tutorials at FreeWebMasterHelp.com.

I also learned about where to host my website and how to buy a domain name.  I’ll be writing more about that in future blogs.

Is it really that hard to learn web design?

What I found out later is that I didn’t really need to do all of this.  There are great programs that can allow you to create a website with very little programming knowledge.  However, if you have the time, learning some basic programming is definitely worth it.  I will be blogging about some of these methods in the months to come.

The launch of the site

It took a few weeks for me to get my site running.  The hardest part was learning how to do the database.  For most people who are reading this, a database will not be necessary for your website.  In many cases a wordpress blog (more info in future posts) will give you everything you need.  For example, this website you are reading right now was up and running within about an hour by using a wordpress blog.

Once my site was up I delved into learning about SEO (search engine optimization).  I found really good information on forums such as HighRankings and a great tutorial at webconfs.com.

My first sale

One day, I checked my email and it said I had a new question from someone about their cat.  I was sooooooo excited!  Then, when I read the question, it was from my husband (and it was very silly!) LOL!

However, a couple of days later I had my first real question about a cat with some skin problems.  And since then I have had lots of paying customers.

Can you create a website when you have limited experience?

Definitely!  You don’t need to go through all of the hard work that I did.    As I write this blog you will get lots of information on how to set up your site, including advice on hosting, domain name purchase and more.

I’d like to thank….God. 

John Counsell and I do a radio show every 3 months

I have to tell you that it is very exciting creating a website with the help of the Lord.  When I was on my time of rest with my back injury there were nights that I could not sleep – not because of my back pain but instead, because the Lord was downloading ideas in my mind.  I would be trying to sleep and then all of a sudden I would think, “Oh, I could promote my website by doing a radio show!”, and then I would be up all night daydreaming with the Lord about how that would look.  (The next day I contacted a local radio host and it turned out that he was looking for a veterinarian to do a show with him.  I now do a regular late night talk show on the radio!  How cool is God?)

It has only been a few months since www.AskAVetQuestion has gone online and since then I have created several websites including some for local businesses.  It really is a lot of fun.  I’m looking forward to teaching you what I have learned, and what I am continuing to learn as I go along!

Marie