needing a better understanding

[motdaugrnds]

I'm about to set up a website. I found BlueHost for $4.95 per month (apparently a sales at this time as was $6.95/mo).

I spoke via "live chat" with that host and was told I could pay via personal check for the term of service I chose (12 months, 24 months or 36 months) and that I could then set up as many "sub-domains" as I wanted without addition cost to me. I was also told "renewal" of domains cost extra.

Has anyone been with BlueHost long enough to have experienced paying this "extra" to renew your domain? If so, what was your experience doing this? Are they doubling the cost each successive term you're with them?

I also looked over HostGator services and found their "resource usage" confusing in that there were 12 things one could "not" do and one was to "Use 25% or more of system resources for longer than 90 seconds." How on earth could I upload and create my site in only a minute and a half?

HostGator also states on it's main page that there would be "unlimited disk space" and "unlimited bandwidth"; yet somewhere else on their site, I discovered if I went over a certain amount of bandwidth (depending on what I paid for), my site would be stopped for awhile. Thus, this is confusing to me.

HostGator is offering 3 plans as follows:
1. Reseller Plan for "making money with your own web hosting business".
2. VPS Plan to "get dedicated functionality without the expense".
3. Dedicated Plan to "feel the power and flexibility of a HostGator dedicated server"

All I'm wanting is a shop to sell a limited number of jewelry and toys as well as a blog that I can keep going indefinately. None of those plans appear to be suitable for this.

After choosing one of these to host my shop (and a blog), I would need the following:
1. a program for working the site, i.e. setting up my htm page I guess this means
2. a shopping method as I will be selling things
3. a method of payment for those buying my items
4. a method of permitting users of my shop to "search this site"
5. a contact button for getting any personal questions answered

Are these 5 things separate from the hosting services, i.e. will I need to search elsewhere for each and then somehow place them on my webpage?

Also, I understand people can actually take your domain name unless you set up your name with each of the .com, .org, .bus, etc. extensions. Is this correct? This means to me I would be having to pay for each of those sites whether or not I had a use for them...just to keep my domain name. Is this correct?

At this time I'm leaning toward BlueHost because it appears to be less confusing to me. BlueHost told me they know nothing about "ZenCart" or "OpenCart" and only used "Weebly", which I know nothing about...actually I know nothing about ZenCart or OpenCart either!

I've actually set up a website (not a "shop" nor a "blog") several years ago and created my own html files for uploading to the hosting site. I used "Note Tab Light" to do this at that time. It's been awhile; so I've forgotten a lot of the coding I used and would need to study html again.

Any help would be appreciated as I'm feeling quite ignorant and overwhelmed.

[JLMissouri]

I am no expert, I just set up my account earlier this year. I went with Bluehost, while setting up my account I had two problems, neither were caused by Bluehost but by wordpress. Bluehost helped me fix both and had top notch customer service. I paid for three years on both my domain and hosting.

"I also looked over HostGator services and found their "resource usage" confusing in that there were 12 things one could "not" do and one was to "Use 25% or more of system resources for longer than 90 seconds." How on earth could I upload and create my site in only a minute and a half?"

I think that refers to their entire system of all the websites they are hosting. It is to prevent one very popular website from hogging all the power. While setting up your website you can spend days working on it and there wouldn't be a problem. For your website to use 25% of their system it would be huge.

I wouldn't worry too much on bandwidth usage for a blog and regular website. If your site should get that much traffic that it becomes a problem you have it made anyway, as the site will pay the bills. It would actually be a good problem to have.

I don't have much experience setting up a site to sell stuff. Paypal has a feature where you can add buy it now buttons on your site and also has a shipping calculator. I played with it awhile and realized Ebay's fees are very competitive for all the services they offer. I now just direct people to Ebay to buy the one item I have on my site, an automaitc chicken watering bucket.

When setting up my site I used a template in wordpress. It is a cookie cutter site which does all the hard work for you. Most of these templates are already setup with a contact page and a blog page. You can also add more pages easily. My template already had a search function as well. Wordpress is free and there are many free templates as well as templates you have to buy.

"Also, I understand people can actually take your domain name unless you set up your name with each of the .com, .org, .bus, etc. extensions. Is this correct? This means to me I would be having to pay for each of those sites whether or not I had a use for them...just to keep my domain name. Is this correct?"

If you buy a domain name with a .com no one can get it for the time period you have it purchased for. They could get the same name with a .net on the end but does it really matter? People that are going to your site will realize they are on the wrong site anyway. I would get a .com site as first preference. This is a sale gimmick to get you to buy more domain names in my opinion.