Selecting A Web Host

When choosing a web hosting provider, it is important to first consider what your specific needs are. Web hosting generally falls into the following categories:

Free Web Hosting

Choosing a free host is a good solution for those who would like to experiment with web design or host a low-traffic personal site. Free hosting often includes a small amount of storage and bandwidth. Features tend to be limited, often with no support for PHP, MySQL, multiple email addresses, and poor web statistics. Bottom line: Free hosting is great to practice your web design, or even host a web site for family and friends. However, free hosting is not a plausible solution for the serious web master or business owner.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the most popular type of web host on the market. Nearly all small businesses, intermediate to large web sites, and professional web sites require only a fraction of the resources of a complete web server. It would be expensive for these sites to all reside on their own server, which makes shared hosting the perfect choice.

Depending on the specific hosting plan, nearly all of a webserver's features should be available: PHP or ASP, MySQL, multiple email address, and a much greater amount of storage and bandwidth than with a free host. The downside to having a shared host is lessened security, due to 10's to 100's of other clients on your server, and usually total email addresses, databases and domains are not unlimited.

Dedicated Servers - Unmanaged

If shared hosting does not give you enough bandwidth, storage, or the features that you require, a dedicated hosting solution may be the right solution for you. With a dedicated server there are no limits on the number of databases and email aliases you can create. Your bandwidth is much greater, with typical dedicated server plans alotting 500-1000GB of bandwidth per month. If extra storage is needed, simply order a new hard drive for your server. The only downside: you must know a great deal about server administration.

Becoming a skilled server administrator requires a great deal of training and computing know how. If you are low on cash and are willing to learn server administration the hard way, prepare for a difficult journey. However, if your budget is large enough, then managed dedicated hosting may be a better solution.

Dedicated Servers - Managed

You have steep requirements for your web site. Shared hosting does not work for you, but you do not know how to set up your own web server, nor do you know how to customize it to your needs. You are going to need a lot of assistance to get your server box up and running and you need support when something goes wrong. The solution for you is a managed dedicated solution provider.

Managed hosting is a very specialized market, with a wide range of prices that depend on how much security, reliability, and the level of support you require. When choosing a managed dedicated server provider we recommend that you either get referred to the provider from a trusted associate or do a few hours of research on the web. Whatever you do, do not rush into a long term contract without knowing a fair amount about the service provider. Server and Operating System

You'll find that most web hosting providers will provide their clients with either a Windows NT/2000/XP machine for their operating system/server or the generally cheaper, more stable and feature-laden Unix systems running the Apache server. If you want to use software like ASP, you have must use a Windows NT/2000/XP machine for your server. Otherwise, Unix will do nicely. These servers enable you to configure facilities that you would ordinarily need on your site such as error pages, protecting your images, blocking email harvesters, blocking IP addresses, etc., without having to ask your web host to implement them. Help in configuring Apache servers is widely available. If you want use dynamically generated pages that can access databases, you can just as well use the more portable PHP instead of tying yourself down to ASP.

Data transfer (sometimes referred to as "traffic" or "bandwidth") is the quantity of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they access your site.

How much bandwidth do you need? For a small website with very low traffic, a bandwidth of 2 GB (2000KB) per month is enough. Consider, though, how many pictures or other large files must be loaded onto each page whenever that page is accessed. Your traffic requirements will grow over time, as your site becomes more well-known. If yours is an e-commerce site, consider the amount of people that would browse your site each month. Most web hosts will provide at least 20GB. If you go over this limit, you will be charged extra. Be certain you know what this charge will be up front. Make sure you'll be charged according to actual usage rather than prepay for potential overage.

By the way, you may see web hosting providers that advertise "unlimited bandwidth". This is not exactly the case since the host has to pay for your additional bandwidth and will most likely not bear your extra costs. Unless you look for details up front on how much traffic the package allows you may suddenly receive an exorbitant bill for having exceeded the "unlimited bandwidth".

Most sites use less than 5MB (MB = 1024 KB or kilobytes) of web space and most web hosts will allow you more than enough disk space, usually about 800MB. For a small website with up to 100 pages with no large image or media files, a server space of 25 MB is sufficient. Your needs will vary, depending on how many pictures, sound files, video clips, etc. your site uses. So in reality, don't let disk space be too big a factor in your comparisons of web hosts.

FTP access is a convenient feature to have to upload files to the web server. If you want to allow your visitors to download anything from your site, you need FTP access. Also, most HTML editors requires the use of FTP to upload your web pages to the server. E-mail Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding

The vast majority of web hosting providers provide email service. If you'll be using your own domain name, an email with that domain name is necessary. Look for other email features like auto responders which allows you to set an email address to automatically reply to the sender with a preset message, mailing lists, POP access (using email clients like MS Outlook Express), web email access for accessing your email from another computer, mail forwarding which is a catch-all email account that allows anyname@yourdomain.com to be automatically forwarded to your current email address), etc. If you have an e-commerce site, email is essential for your customers to communicate with you. Control Panel

This may be referred to by various names by different web hosts, but essentially, control panels allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. At the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses and change passwords for your account which is better than having to go through their technical support each time.

This is very important. Most web hosts provide some kind of support. The method of support varies. A 24/7 toll-free phone number is ideal. Many web hosts use a live chat format, others use email. Email or call them before signing up and see how quickly they respond. If you have an e-commerce site, fast, 24/7 support is imperative.

Web hosting providers should make all of these available (see Glossary). Some commercial hosts do not allow you to install PHP or CGI scripts without their approval. This is not desirable since it means you have to wait for them before you can implement a feature on your site. ".htaccess" is needed for customizing your error pages (pages that display when, for instance, a user requests for a non-existent page on your site). Telnet or SSH access is useful for testing CGI scripts, maintaining databases, etc. Cron jobs are used to automatically start up programs at a particular time such as every morning at 10AM. You may not need these features now but if yours is an e-commerce site, you may require them going forward.

If you are planning an e-commerce site, see if the web host provides these features. Additional charges may apply. Make sure they are available before you commit. You will need SSL if you plan to collect credit card information on your site.

Not only should the web host be reliable and fast, it should guarantee its uptime (the time when it is functional). Look for a minimum uptime of 99.5% or higher. This is especially important for e-commerce sites where any downtime can be costly. 100% uptime is difficult and expensive, but less than 99.5% should not be considered. The host should provide some sort of refund (e.g. prorated refund or discount) if it falls below that figure. Note though that guarantees are often hard to enforce from your end - the host usually requires all sorts of documentation. However, without that guarantee, the web host will have little incentive to ensure that its servers are running all the time. Money back guarantee

Any web hosts that does not provide a 30 day money back satisfaction guarantee should be avoided. After considering your requirements, you can return to the Home page to select the web hosting companies that will suit your needs. Spend some time on each web host site to get an idea of what's available from these web hosts and how they might fit in with your ideas. Spending some time now will save a lot of headache later. Price and Payment Plans

You'll notice the current prices for a basic web hosting package don't vary much and are low enough for anyone wanting a web host on which to place their site. Of course the more features you require beyond the basic ones, the more expensive it will be. Most web hosts will allow you to select from a variety of payment plans, monthly, semi annually, annually, etc. The longer the period, the cheaper the rate. It may be in your best interests to pay monthly with all new web hosts until you're comfortable and assured of their reliability and honesty. Paying monthly allows you to switch web hosts quickly in the event current host does not meet your requirements or expectations. This way, you need not be tied down to a bad web host. After several months or a year, if you're satisfied with the web host, you can often change payment plans to the discounted plans.

By the way, while price is always a factor, you should realize that you often get what you pay for. Having said that, it's also not necessarily true that the most expensive hosts are the best.

Not all hosting companies own or lease their own web servers. Some of them are actually resellers for another hosting company. The disadvantage of using a reseller is the possibility that you are dealing with people who don't know much about the system they are selling and who take longer to help you (they have to transmit your technical support request to the actual hosting company for it to be acted upon). However, this also depends on both the reseller and the underlying hosting company. It is thus wise not to rule out all resellers; there are a number of reliable and fast ones who are actually quite good and cheap. In fact, a number of resellers sell the same packages cheaper than their original hosting company. If you do find a particular company you're considering is a reseller, you should investigate both the reseller and the actual hosting company.