It is not a small decision to choose a web host for your web site. Once your website begins to flourish and grow, it will become very difficult to move your website to some other host. It is critical to “get it right the first time”. Find out as much as you can about your prospective host before making any decisions.
I’ve been making web sites for long now and almost all my clients ask me to arrange the web host too. Many times I burnt my fingers and incurred losses. Many times I had to pay from my own pocket without getting reimbursed. Anyway, we are always learning. Now that I’m selling the Linux Web Hosting and keeping up with Bytesworth tradition of truth and transparency, I suggest you keep the following points in mind before purchasing your web hosting package.
After Sale Service
I make after sale service the first point of my article because this is the primordial feature of any web hosting package. My experience has been that the web hosting providers have the worst track record of after sale service, and many sites succumb to their irresponsible behavior. They just don’t respond when something goes wrong! So when I decided to sell web hosting from my site (checkout http://www.bytesworth.com/webhosting), I decided that my strength would be: fast response and good service.
Web Space
How much space do you really need to host your site? It depends on the sort of site plan you have for yourself. A good, average site like mine, can be hosted in a 5MB to 10MB package. Graphics take up lots of space sometimes. If you plan to put up lots of PDF files, then you should go for a bigger package because these files have large sizes. Then, multimedia and FLASH files are big space eaters. They can easily take up 300MB to 1000MB.
Although every web hosting company has to sell a “Package” I suggest, if you are not sure how much space you are going to need, buy the smallest package. You can always upgrade.
Web Hosting Technology
The web hosting technology depends on what platform you are going to use to develop your web site. For instance, all my pages are ASP pages, so I’m using Windows2000 server. A client of mine has his site on a Linux server.
Basically, there are three types of hosting technologies that various hosting companies offer to you:
= Linux
Linux is an operating system which was created in 1991 and has been widely accepted as a powerful operating system for business applications since the late ninety’s. Linux based development tools are available free of charge as part of free software initiatives and widely supported online through an ever growing developer community.
PHP, JSP/Java Servlets, PostgreSQL and MySQL allow for rapid cost-effective development of web based services.
= Windows
You should choose Windows hosting if you plan to use ASP (Active Server Pages) as server scripting, or if you plan to use a database like Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL Server. Windows hosting is also the best choice if you plan to develop your web site using Microsoft Front Page.
= UNIX
Unix was the first (original) web server operating system, and it is known for being reliable and stable. Often less expensive than Windows. There are die-hard users of UNIX. UNIX has proven to be substantially faster than most other server platforms, as well as the most secure environment available, thus becoming a mainstay within the corporate and e-commerce world. However, UNIX’s greatest feature may be reliability and performance. Unmatched processing power combined with powerful operating system stability makes UNIX the best choice for many applications. Unlike the Microsoft NT environment, UNIX uses no GUI (Graphical User Interface) overhead, and is able to concentrate the full power of the machine to serve your web sites as they are being accessed.
Connection Speed
Visitors will come to your site from all over the world and different regions have different NET connection speeds.
Visitors to your web site will often connect via a modem, but your host provider should have a much faster connection.
In the early days of the Internet a T1 connection was considered a fast connection. Today connection speeds are much faster for .
Before you sign up a contract with any hosting provider, surf some other web sites on their servers, and try to get a good feeling about their network speed. Also compare the other sites against yours, to see if it looks like you have the same needs. Contacting some of the other customers is also a valuable option.
Monthly Traffic or Bandwidth
When you access a web site, you are downloading a file. This file can be an HTML web page, a GIF image, a MIDI sound file, or a combination of these. These files are downloaded to your computer and displayed in your web browser. Each time you download a file, data is being transferred. The amount of data depends on the size of the file. If you download a web page that is 1 kilobyte (1,024 bytes), or 1 KB, in size, then 1 KB of data has been transferred. If 100 people access that same web page, then 100 KB of data has been transferred. This is Bandwidth.
A small or medium web site will consume between 1 and 5GB of data transfer per month.
Most personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month. If you have a web site that is composed of static web pages and you expect little traffic to your site on a daily basis, go with a low bandwidth plan. If you go over the amount of bandwidth allocated in your plan, your hosting company could charge you over usage fees, so if you think the traffic to your site will be significant, you may want to go through the calculations above to estimate the amount of bandwidth required in a hosting plan.
You can calculate this by multiplying your average page size with the number of expected page views per month. If your average page size is 30K and you expect 50,000 page views per month, you will need 0.03MB x 50,000 = 1.5GB.
Larger, commercial sites often consume more than 100GB of monthly traffic.
Before you sign a contract with a host provider, make sure to check this:
= What are the restrictions on monthly transfer
= Will your site be closed if you exceed the volume
= Will you be billed a fortune if you exceed the volume
= Will my future needs be covered
= Is upgrading a simple task
Email Services
A standard web hosting package should include email accounts for each person in your company that can be used using email software such as Eudora, Outlook etc.
All Web Hosting packages must include unlimited email forwarding addresses which you can set-up yourself, anytime through your own control panel. They should also include a “catch-all” email forwarder. Any messages sent to an email address @ your domain that does not exist will automatically go to the real email account you specify for the catch all forwarder. Similarly, you should be able to create “aliases” that are, sort of, dummy email addresses. They don’t exist in reality, but if someone sends an email to them, the email is re-directed to a designated address.
Then, you should be able to create as many POP accounts as you need. A POP3 email address is a ‘standard’ email address, such as the one you may already have with your ISP. With POP3 you can send and receive email directly from your domain name through an email client such as Microsoft Outlook Express.
Almost every web host these days provides mailing list facilities so that you can publish your own newsletters or carry out promotional campaigns.
Other Web Hosting Features
Apart from the features mentioned above, there are some miscellaneous facilities that help you manage your site well.
= FTP ACCOUNT FOR 24/7 UPLOADING
You should get unlimited FTP access so that you can upload and download files from the server whenever you have to.
= SECURE CONTROL PANEL TO ADMINISTER YOUR ACCOUNT
A control panel is a graphic user interface you can use to manage your account, such as creating email accounts and aliases, managing your contact information, creating DNS, etc.
= REAL-TIME GRAPHICAL USER STATISTICS
You need a good server statistics software to know your traffic data. Such a software tells you the demographical nature of your traffic. It also gives you other useful details such as through which page a user enters your site and through which page he or she leaves.
Amrit Hallan is a freelance copywriter,
and a website content writer. He also dabbles
with PHP and HTML. For more tips and tricks in
PHP, JavaScripting, XML, CSS designing and
HTML, visit his blog at
http://www.aboutwebdesigning.com
