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After considering several characteristics of your intended website - complexity, content, and your own technical abilities - in Part 1 of this article, we arrived at the following conclusions. It will be a personal website of a very basic technical nature; it will have a fair amount of dynamic content on it; and, that you'll be doing the website development, publishing, and maintenance yourself. (We're assuming, also, that you've already identified and registered an Internet domain name (e.g., www.mysitename.com) with any of the domain name registrars.

Because the site you'll be putting up will be simple and basic in nature, you'll only need some of the more fundamental tools. All of the cheap web hosting for beginners providers include a simple web design tool (usually a set of automated templates), a file manager utility to manage your website's files on the server, and more than enough email accounts. As far as disk storage and network bandwidth allowances go these days, the trend is to offer unlimited levels for both, even in the most basic hosting package. (You can always purchase more later if you want to take your website up a notch or two in complexity.)

Now that your website's preliminary requirements have been determined, it's time to move on to consider several more important topics. How long do you plan on keeping your personal site online? Monthly plans are the standard offering, some with very attractive discounts for a year or multi-year engagements. If you're truly serious about putting up a website, I'd suggest subscribing to at least a one-year plan. This not only gives you enough time to become established online, but you'll also be taking advantage of any special savings.

Credit cards are typically the way you pay for your hosting account. Your hosting company usually keeps your credit card number in their database to facilitate auto-renewals of your hosting account; most all send periodic renewal notices prior to your plan's expiration. Since you don't want your website to disappear from the internet, I'd strongly suggest having

your account set up this way. You won't run the risk, then, of having your hosting account suspended due to your forgetting to renew it.

Even the easy web hosting for beginners providers' plans differ a little, so you'll probably want to do a little comparison research. You'll want to try to get a sense of their server and network characteristics. Here are some things to stay alert to while you're making these comparisons:

- Take a look at your prospective hosting plan and see if you can tell what kind of hardware your website will be hosted upon. If it's not a brand name like Compaq, Dell, HP, or Sun, it'll probably be a cheaper, less-reliable "white box" server.

- Make sure you can call a toll-free 8xx number for technical support; is that included in your potential hosting plan? Email and chat support channels work, but you may want more support than that.

- One IP address is typically shared among the more inexpensive hosting accounts all located on the same server. If any of these "neighbors" of yours engage in disreputable behavior like spamming, that IP may be blocked. This effectively can make your own website inaccessible to others. If that happens, get your own IP address for your website; it's typically only a couple dollars per month extra.

These tips may seem like a lot to remember, but if you do, you'll be one of the better-informed new webmasters out there and will come out ahead. Try to take full advantage of any pricing specials being offered. Make your pick and it won't be long before you'll have your own unique presence on the World Wide Web. Enjoy!

With 15 years of hands-on experience, author Markys Robertson writes frequently about website design, cheap web hosting for beginners, internet protocols, and other Internet related topics. If you're looking for the best web hosting for beginners, click here to see some of Markys' top recommended providers.

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