I'm going to be documenting some of the issues that I am facing as a newbie to the world of self-publishing. Hopefully, it will help make your journey easier - you can learn from my mistakes. Being terrified can't stop you or me from doing what we have to! The first trial all self-published authors - and pretty much all professionals that rely on the internet for business - have to go through is setting up a website, a surprisingly time-consuming task. Before you can even start fiddling with your template, you have to choose a web-hosting company. This has turned out to be a surprisingly challenging task, even considering all that I know about the various web hosts. In my history as a freelance writer, I have written many articles comparing hosting companies like Bluehost, Hostgator, and GoDaddy. I should know all this stuff, right? And then it came time to actually choose the web host. A friend of mine, fellow author Peter J. Story, found that Bluehost gave him no end of troubles. His site gave visitors from outside the U.S. all sorts of troubles, and he eventually had to switch over to another company. He now works with Digital Ocean, a site he claims is easy to use, is reliable, and cost-effective. On the downside, he had to set up his own server in order to get full control over the site. I'm nowhere near that tech-savvy, so that option is out. My brother is a web developer, and he has worked with GoDaddy in the past. He said that it was good, but the cost of setting up a website on GoDaddy seemed a bit too high for me. Hostgator was the cheapest option around, so that's what I'm working with right now. It's a cheap option, but that kind of backfired. I paid for the hosting on Thursday, and only got the account on Saturday. When I called, they said that due to the high volume of new accounts, it was going to take time. Worst of all, they didn't send a confirmation email, and they didn't know how long it would take to get it set up. So, cheap isn't always best, a lesson that I hope I don't have to learn the hard way too many more times. I'm resisting the urge to spend as little as possible on an editor, a book cover designer, and a comic book artist for all of my works, so I figure my rookie website can be a bit simplistic and affordable to start. Once I start rolling in the dough, I'll consider upgrading. All that to say, choosing hosting should be so much easier than it really is! It takes way too much time and research to find these things out, and you never really know what you're going to get until you actually try them. The reviews you read online aren't always accurate - something I found out the hard way.