There are currently eight legitimate ways to get your Website onto the the Internet.

1. Your Own Web Server (aka Deep Pockets)

You'd better have a PhD in Computer Science, a minor in Rocket Science and a computer-geek brother-in-law to follow this path. You'll need:

• Web server (computer that "serves" applications, streaming media, and software)
• Operating system (generally Windows NT or some flavor of UNIX like Red Hat Linux)
• Web-server software (50% of all servers use Apache Web Server (60% of them are Linux), Java Web Server, iPlanet Web Server Fast Track, Netscape FastTrack, Netscape Enterprise, Microsoft Internet Information Server, etc.)
• Lease a fast line from your office to the Internet (see Technology Needs for Your Business)
• A router
• Time and money to set up and maintain it; probably a 24 hour staff.

Cost: $1,500 to $5,000 computer, a very expensive broadband connection to the Internet, $1,200 to $3,000 a month or more or else limit hits with a modem or DSL connection, software cost of $2,000-$10,000, miscellaneous equipment, the cost of 3 employees to keep it all running 24/7, and KNOWLEDGE. 

2. Your Own Web Server at a "Co-location" Facility

A “co-location” facility is in the business of setting up and running a bunch of individual servers, usually several connected through a switch box to one monitor and one keyboard for a tech to maintain. A co-location host company take care of the facility, the setup, software, 24/7 maintenance, the high speed Internet connection and spread the costs among the many "co-located" companies.

Your business either buys or rents the server and has exclusive use of the server.

Cost: About $$500-2,500 to purchase a server. (google 'server prices" and scroll to "Shopping Results for Server Prices") Rental and Hosting is about $50 to $400 for monthly fees. However, server costs can be $8,000 and up; hosting fees can be $4.95 to several hundred thousands of dollars per month.

Trend setters in co-location include Qwest Communications, NTT/Verio, Rackspace, and ServerBeach.

3. At Your ISP’s Free Personal Web Space

ISPs and online services (e.g. AOL) allow their users to set up Web pages. Each account comes with a certain amount of free disk space which you can fill with pictures of:

• your cat
• your kids
• your cat's kids
• Your cat's food (your kids hamsters)
• your favorite links
• your dog
• your, etc.

4. A Free-Page Web Site

If your service provider doesn't give you any Web space, AND you’re on a tight budget, AND if you want to spend nothing, it’s hard to beat. This isn’t really suitable for most businesses, of course, but the pages will cost you ... well, nothing. In other words, the services that most businesses need at their Web sites won’t be available. AND you won’t own the URL, either.

Cost: Free

There are sites that put up your Web page for free, then hope that you’ll pay them to update the page; sites that provide free space to special interests (schools, charities, students, actors, artists). Try some of the following links:

Free Home Page Center
http://www.freehomepage.com/

The Free Pages Page
http://starbase.neosoft.com/~peter/freepages.html

Angelfire
http://www.angelfire.com/

Bizland
http://www.bizland.com/

Yahoo!—GeoCities (Perhaps the biggest free-space service)
http://www.geocities.com/

Free.com (lists over 120 places providing free Web space)
http://www.free.com/

Tripod
http://www.tripod.com/

Xoom
http://www.xoom.com/

Yahoo!—Free Web Pages
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Internet_
Services/Web_Services/Free_Web_Pages

5. A Cybermall

A cybermall is a shopping mall on the Web. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. The Internet is supposed to free us from geography, yet here we are bunching businesses together at one site. If you are promoting your business properly, it doesn’t have to be at the same Web server as a gazillion other businesses, so what’s the point of a mall? The mall owners would say that they bring people into the mall, though that’s open to debate. It’s certain, though, that simply placing a Web store in a mall isn’t enough to bring people to you; you’ll still need to promote your site elsewhere. (yes, I'm biased. It seems to be an outdated idea)

Still, if you want to check out the malls (it’s a great way to find examples of poor Web design, so you can avoid making the same mistakes), take a look at these sites:

Access Market Square (they claim to be the oldest cybermall)
http://www.amsquare.com/

iMall (one of the largest malls)
http://www.imall.com/

ShopInternet
http://shopinternet.ro.com/

Yahoo!—Online Shopping
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Shopping_
Centers/Online_Shopping/Directories/

On the other hand, iMall claims huge numbers of “hits” each month for its stores. (What’s a hit? That depends on how a Web-server administrator decides to measure activity. A hit may mean a single page being transferred to a Web browser, or it may mean any kind of transfer—a page, an image, an error message, and so on. So a single visit to a site may count as scores of hits.)

Cost: on average, $395 setup fee, plus $50 a month or 5 percent of your sales each month; $50 an hour to design and set up your site.

6. A Web Store

A Web store is like a Web mall, except that instead of acting like a mall, with your Web pages being a single store among many, your Web pages represent a single product or group of products on a store homepage. The idea behind these companies is that they provide a more easily promote-able service to a particular type of consumer—book buyers in the examples below:

BooksAmerica
http://www.booksamerica.com/

BookWorld
http://www.bookworld.com/

BookZone
http://www.bookzone.com/

Cost: similar to cybermalls above

7. Auction Sites or Marketplaces

These offer special sites where you can vend limited amounts of merchandise, run advertisements, set links, place classified ads, exchange information via chat or bulleton boards, get newsletters, read and write reviews and so on.

Examples:
http://www.ebay.com/
http://www.audiogon.com/
Amazon Sell Your Stuff

8a At a Web Host’s/ISP's Site in a Subdirectory or Subdomain

Set up your own Web site! Forget the malls and stores, forget those silly little personal Web pages. Web host/ISP's allow you to set up a full-blown site of your own by buying space on its computers.

Cost:  $10-$50 per month; plus shopping cart software one-time fee of $0-$800.

Web hosts provide 5 ways of setting up your Web site URL:

A Non-virtual Web Site -  is a Web site set up without using your own domain; your Web site appears to be part of the Web host’s site where your company’s URL will start with the Web-hosting company’s domain name, and end with your company name:

http://www.cruzio.com/davidssite/

A Subdomain - you appear to have your own domain. 

http://davidssite.cruzio.com/

In both cases, if you decide to move your site later, you’ll have to get a new URL.

8b. E-commerce Services

E-commerce services are a newer and now well-established and popular type of service. They are what most of us hear advertised and touted as "your" answer to all eCommerce needs for small business.

Costs: $20-$400 simple cart to $4,000 for unlimited products fee;  plus $12-$50 monthly or more.

Some of these services appear to be very much like malls, because it’s possible to search throughout all the member stores for products. But that’s just an extra feature, it’s not primary—these are shopping-cart services, not malls. The following are two popular systems and a third new one:

MerchandiZer
http://www.merchandizer.com/

Yahoo! Store
http://store.yahoo.com/

BizBlast.com
http://BizBlast.com/

Microsoft bCentral
http://www.bcentral.com/

8c. A Web-Hosting/ISP Company as a Virtual Domain

A Virtual Web Server - In order to set up a virtual Web host, you need to get your own domain name.

Your URL will now be http://www.davidssite.com/ To the outside world it will appear that you have your own Web server. In fact the Web-hosting company may have thousands of different domain names, all pointing to the host’s computers and each owned by a different company.

Cost: $20- $35 per month for a basic virtual Web host.

Note: This is likely your best-of-all-worlds choice for you.

A Fake Virtual Web Server - also sometimes referred to as “partial virtual servers” and “IP-less” (pronounced “eye-pee-less”) servers. While in the case of a virtual server the Web URL has to be assigned its own IP number, multiple fake virtual Web servers can be assigned to a single IP number and sort to your particular site. You won't get FTP to and from your site easily and old browsers may not work. May be cheaper than a virtual Web host.

A Dedicated Web Server - You’ll get not only your own domain name but even your own computer. The Web-hosting company will set aside a computer for you, and you’ll have dedicated use of that computer. This service is, of course, much more expensive.

Cost: $295-$500 per month for this service.

You may want this service if your Web site grows big enough and busy enough to warrant its own computer.

What’s the difference between this and the co-location service I mentioned earlier? The only real difference is that with co-location you own the server rather than rent it.

Web Hosting or Is the Way to Go

It must be obvious by now which method I think is the most suitable in most cases: You should set up a site with your own domain name at a Web-hosting company. For some of you, E-commerce Services will be your solution as opposed to building a site yourself or buying an off the shelf product.