Web Hosting Provider Selection

My company provides web site hosting services, so you may want to take what I have to say here with a grain or two of salt, but it also puts us in a position to better explain hosting terms.  So hear goes...

 

Free or Paid Hosting

Everyone loves free stuff.  Free hosting sounds great, you sign up with just an email address, no credit card required and you are given tools to make your own site and launch it live pretty much immediately.  That though is about the extant of the pros to free hosting.

 

Downsides include:

1. You do not have your own domain name, but a name that is part of your provider's domain name. Your name also is going to probably be long.  So instead of having www.yourcompany.com you might have www.freeprovider.com/users/~yourcompany/. This makes it hard to promote it on your other marketing material or advertising.

2. The majority of the free services are free because they are supported by advertisements.  These ads automatically appear on your pages, and may include popup ads.

3. No email.  You must use your email provided by your ISP, or a free service such as Hot Mail or other such provider.  This again makes corporate branding about impossible.

4. No E-Commerce.  Most free providers do not allow any form of e-commerce, and some do not allow any type of business web site.

 

The alternative to the free web hosting services of course are the paid services.  In this category there are more choices to consider.  The first is the level of hosting you need.  You can have at the most basic level shared or dedicated hosting.  Shared hosting means that you are going to share a server with other people.  Depending on the company and the server you may be sharing with ten other people, or you may be sharing with 1,000 others.

 

This may sound bad, but usually it isn't.  The key is to find a reputable hosting company that has been in business awhile.  Most companies do not need much in way of web hosting, just enough to provide a presence for them on the Internet and allow them to have a professional looking email address.  If the hosting company carefully monitors their systems and ensures that the proper security measures are in place then shared hosting allows you to have a low cost, but highly reliable hosting account.  Basic hosting usually costs between $2-$100 a month.

 

For web sites that have a great amount of traffic or has specialized requirements a dedicated hosting account may be required.  A dedicated account on the other hand means that you are renting a whole server yourself.  It is important if you are going to have a dedicated account to know if the price you are quoted includes management.  Typically you do not want to be responsible for server management unless you have a full time IT person (or department) as maintaining a server properly is an ongoing commitment that really doesn't offer you any business value, except for when you don't and your web site gets hacked because you forgot to install that patch from two years ago.

 

Having a dedicated server though typically will offer you lower prices when looking at large disk space and bandwidth requirements when looking at a megabyte by megabyte comparison, but you also need to be aware of other possible charges.  Some companies charge a flat rate, others may have a really low price, but you may soon find that there are lots of extras that you really need that drive that low price way up. Dedicated Server prices typically run from $200 to $500 a month.

Another varient of dedicated hosting is cluster hosting.  This level of hosting can become very complex quite fast though.  If you have a site that must be on-line and server pages to visitors up to 100% of the time a cluster setup is what you need to be looking at.  These you typically won't find unless you go through a company that can configure it for you.  Pricing for this level has so many variables, but is usually pretty steep.  However if you are a company that can put a price tag on being down for 20 minutes at 2 am once every other week, then this may be what you need.

Some other things to be aware of:

• Uptime Guarantee
• Long Term Contracts
• Domain Name Registration Ownership
• Server type – Linux or Microsoft?
• Database support
• Programming language support
• SSH Access
• Control Panel Functionality
• Statistical analysis capabilities
• Backup policies
• Overselling
• Email Accounts

I'll talk about these points in an upcoming posting.

 

Comments

[dotservant.com website hosting]

Good introduction to web hosting, I am sure this is going to help lots of web hosting beginners find their way to a comfortable home for their website.

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