So where can you go to get information about which ISP you should use? The Web, of course:

• The List contains a massive list of ISPs around the world. It's a particularly great resource if you want to choose an ISP that's headquartered in your area. You can search by area code, state, or country, and find lots of pricing information. You should, however, always verify prices with each ISP you're considering.
• WebHosters.com is an information-rich site with lots of information on different hosting companies.
• HostReview.com is another information-rich site providing details on various hosting companies.

Search your local yellow pages and ask around to find out which ISP your friends and family use, as well. There are a lot of local ISPs who do as good a job as the national services for the same price or less.

Shop the Specs

At this stage in your Web design career, you're not actually going to understand all of the features you see described on ISP sites. At a minimum, you're going to want the following features:

• A minimum of 20 MB (megabytes) of disk space: You want a large chunk of space to store your images, HTML files, and other content. The more, the better. Even if you're just getting started and your Web pages barely use a fraction of that space, if the price for 20 MB of disk space is the same as the price for 5 MB, go with more space.
• One GB of data transfers per month: One GB is one billion bytes. Wow! Data transfer means the movement of bytes to and from your Web site. When a visitor downloads a page (and any associated images or multimedia files), the amount of data transferred is added to your tally for the month. Some Web hosting companies charge you for data transfers exceeding a certain number of MB.
• FTP access to your account: FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. You'll learn about FTP in-depth later in this lesson. For now, it's sufficient to say you need this to move (upload) your content from your PC or Mac to the hosting computer.
• E-mail: Make sure your account with an ISP includes e-mail, and that you can pick up your mail from the ISP's mail server directly. In addition, you want as many e-mail addresses as possible. You've probably noticed that many sites use an info@myWebsite.com address, along with others for sales, jobs, etc. Of course, you'll want an address for each person associated with your site, too.

You should also have the ability to add interactive features to your site, and a toll-free, 24/7 tech support number and e-mail address. Make sure all this information is easy to find on your ISP's site.

Once you determine which ISP to contract with, it's time to decide on the name of your site. In the next section, you'll learn how to find a good name and purchase an appropriate domain.