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What should I look for in a good web hosting company?
What Is A Web Host ?
To enable web surfer to access your website it requires a service provider to place your web site on a computer which is connected to the internet. That service provider is call the web host.
Web hosting company uses the computer (just like the computer you have at home) set up as "server" to serve up web sites.
The web host typically rents out web space to you so that you can get your website up on the world wide web (www).
There are thousands of web hosting companies available in the market, with each company having different types of plans and prices. As a newbie to web hosting and just wanting to get your website up on the web can be a challenging task, but with all the extensive informations available on the net, it can be made easy.
There are many different kinds of web hosting plans and setups and also dependent upon your website and budget, any of these may be the right type.
- Free Web Hosting
Just starting, not accustom yet to the world wide wide, need time to learn more and testing before accelerating then try the free web hosting.
Great for small websites, personal homepage or information sites. One distinct feature of free web hosting is, you have to allow advertisements on your pages.
Another type of free hosting is the Free Sub-domain hosting whereby your website address is a subdomain of the free hosting company (www.yoursitename.freehosting.com).
If you do not mind having advertisements on every page of your website, your website is not very important and you do not expect any customer support, then this type of free web hosting may be right for you.
You can check out Geocities and Tripod for the free web hosting.
- Shared Hosting
This is the most common type of web hosting account. Depending on your disk space and bandwidth usage, you can select from the various plans offered and some plan can be quite cheap. You pay a monthly fee and get a share on a server. With this type of hosting, your site is on the same server with many others and at certain instances reliability may suffer.
- Dedicated Hosting
You may want to consider this type of plan if you have many sites or large ecommerce type websites with lot of visitors (thousands a day). With dedicated hosting you have a a lot more freedom with full server dedicated to your website and have access to the server just like you have access to your PC at home. A dedicated server is more reliable and of course also much more expensive compared to a shared hosting plan.
Choosing the Right Web Host for Your Site
Start by making a list of your needs and requirements which basically are platform, speed, accessibility, reliability, support service, and of course, the price.
- Check Your Needs
- DiskSpace - Most web pages (html) are very small (images take up more space), it is unlikely that you will need very much disk space.
Most web hosting plans will offer more disk space than you usually require. It's ok, as it doesn't hurt to have the extra space, usually you will be comfortable with 20 - 30MB of disk space.
- Bandwidth - "Warning, stay away from web hosting companies that offer Unlimited bandwidth", unless you really understand your requirements and their statements of the offer.
Bandwidth (measured in MB or GB) is the amount of actual data that are transferred from the web server that holds your website, to the browser of the web surfer who is looking at your website.
Take time to determine just how much bandwidth will be required by your site on a monthly basis (or is right for you) as hosting plan prices are significantly base on it.
Most small business or personal sites that is composed of static web pages and expect little traffic will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month. One thing that you will want to watch out for when selecting a web host is the additional fee that is charged when you go over your bandwidth limit.
Heavy traffic and big sites with lot of downloads of software, images, audio or video should consider a higher end hosting plans with allocation of 30 to 50GB of bandwidth.
- Email Accounts - Many web hosting companies provide free POP3 account with aliases but some may charge for each POP account. You are given an email address at your own domain such as myname@xyz.com. and you can create more depending on how many free aliases you are given.
Be sure that your package contains enough emails and aliases for your business, preferably an unlimited number of both.
- Support Service - Usually web hosting company will list that they provide 24/7 support. Send an email and ask some questions, the type that you anticipate you will be asking when you host with them. Monitor how efficient they reply to your questions and how fast they respond.
Some provide 24/7 telephone and online live support but if there is a cost for these services in your plan, then ask yourself whether you need it. It costs web hosting companies to provide this type of support, don't pay more for a plan that offers this if you don't need it.
- Platforms
- This is not really a question of which platform is better or worse. The choice depends on what kind of website you have and what you need to be served. If you're putting up a basic or small site with standard HTML, without any server side scripting or database support any one of the platform will do.
For most people just starting out, a Unix server is fine; but if you plan to use databases or ASP on your site, then you should go with NT hosting.
Windows 2000 server web hosting tends to be a little bit more expensive than Linux. If you need to run a Microsoft SQL server database, or use Microsoft Active Server pages then you should choose Windows2000.
If you have no clue what these things even are - then you don't need Windows2000 - you will almost certainly be fine with any type of server.
- Advanced Features -
Web hosting plans can serve a bunch of confusing features. Planning a small and simple website, you may not even need to know or use any of them. For a web designer creating complex database driven sites then you will already know and understand what you need.
Features you have never heard of ASP, ColdFusion, SQL Server, mySQL - then chances are that you don't need to worry about any of these things.
Web sites providing forms and message boards will need a mySQL and access to cgi-bin which are quite commonly use and usually provided by the web hosting companies.
For more advance sites you may need a hosting plan that include features like SSI, JavaScripting, Active Scripting, and PHP capabilities.
The main features which you should have in your hosting plan are, FTP (allows you to upload your files onto the web server) and Control Panel (special administrative page to manage your site).
- Security - The hosting company should be responsible for the protection from unwanted intrusions, denial of service attacks and hackers that will be attempted on your server.
Price
Price is not necessarily a factor on performance. The cost of Web Hosting ranges anywhere from totally free to thousands of dollars a month for a dedicated web hosting server. You may find a site that charges $2 a month that is just as good if not better than a $20 a month site but always remember that you get what you pay for. Price is one factor, value is another. Maybe a focus on value is more important than just price.
Final Analysis
Choosing a web host for your web-site is no small decision. This makes it very important to "get it right the first time". Once committed, it will become very difficult to move your business elsewhere, not to mention the damage that can be done to your business if you make the wrong choice. Find out as much as you can about your prospective web host before making any decisions.
Check if there is a money back guarantee and what their refund policies are; whether there is a requirement to sign up for a minimum period; and if your package is scalable, meaning that upgrades will not be a problem or a burden for you when the needs arise.
If you plan to take any kind of orders over the Internet (ebusiness, shopping), find out if your prospective Web Host offers SSL (Secure Socket Layer). If the server isn't secure, most people will not buy anything from you!
Buy What You NEED, Upgrade Later When Required
A Little Research Goes a Long Way
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