If you’re just getting started with building a website, you may be disheartened by the apparent expense involved. In addition to the time and money that it will take to build the site itself, you can also be looking at substantial fees for things like domain registration, hosting, and additional services companies may suggest that you add to your accounts. Though you might need some of the more expensive options down the line, or you might not, there is a good chance that cheap web hosting services will offer everything you need to get started.

The basic set of services that you need to get from a web hosting provider don’t vary very much from one site to another. You mostly need to be able to log in, upload the pages that you have built along with whatever images that you chose to use, and for other people to then be able to visit the site and look at the pages whenever they want. While additional guarantees like minimum levels of uptime are nice to have, they can also increase the expenses quite a bit without necessarily making a huge difference at the beginning when you are just working on building traffic.

It helps to look closely at the other things that web hosting service providers are trying to offer you as well before you decide to assume you need them. Being able to let people log in through SSL, uploading code and running scripts, or having FTP access can all be nice, but they aren’t absolutely crucial to the core task of building up a basic website. Picking out a web hosting package that offers a pretty minimal level of features can keep your costs down, and then you can add additional options down the line as you find that you need them.

You don’t want to start out assuming that you need something expensive like dedicated website hosting when you are really just trying to get a few web pages up on the Internet so that people know your address and your hours of operation. A basic package will go a long way, and you are free to build on your site over time as you feel ready to expand.