Choosing a Web Hosting Provider – What Aspects Should you Compare?
The great news is that web hosting is a very competitive market, and you have plenty of choices. There is stiff competition for the opportunity to host your website, so make sure that your needs are met. If one company doesn’t meet your needs, there are plenty of other fish in the sea. Here are the things you should consider and compare before signing on with a web hosting company.
The Big Four: Bandwidth, Disk Space, Reliability, Technical Support
When it comes to bandwidth, beware. There are web hosting services out there that promise you “unlimited bandwidth” when in reality, if you want to get picky about it, there’s no such thing. They may well indeed mean “more bandwidth than most websites could ever use,” but that’s still not the same as unlimited bandwidth. If you choose the less expensive shared web hosting, where your site shares a server with a bunch of other sites, be aware that their bandwidth usage could affect you. Suppose another site sharing the same server as you gets a front-page mention on PCWorld or some other huge site. They’ll be snarfling up bandwidth like crazy. Could it affect your site? Well, if their site is overwhelmed to the point that it crashes the server and you share that server, then the answer is yes. Ask any potential web hosting providers what happens in just these situations.
When it comes to disk space, chances are you’ll need 10 MB max, so don’t necessarily be tempted by those “unlimited space” hosting schemes. Reliability and speed, however, should be thoroughly discussed before you sign anything. A guaranteed uptime of 99.8% or better should be a rock bottom requirement. There is no such thing as “regular business hours” when you have a website. Even a little bit of downtime can cost you a customer. Remember: 99% uptime isn’t good enough. 99.5% uptime isn’t good enough. Insist on 99.8% or better uptime.
Does technical support answer 24/7/365? If you were to call tech support at 1:14 a.m. on a holiday, would you get a real, live person or a machine taking a message? If your site is experiencing technical problems, you need help now, not Monday morning when the staff gets back in the office. Insist on real 24/7/365 access to technical service by phone, email, and preferably live chat as well.
Important Things that Might or Might not be Deal Breakers
Chances are, you’re going to want email addresses at your own domain. Does this come with the hosting package? How many email accounts do you get with the hosting package? Do they give you a “catch-all” email that routes any email on the domain to you? What about autoresponders – do you get that capability? You should. Can you use your own email client with the email?
Your account should include the following: crontabs, MySQL, SSH, telnet, .htaccess, SSI, Perl, PHP, FTP. Even if you don’t know what these are, if you hire someone to redesign your site, your programmer will. Some commercial web hosting companies don’t let you install PHP or Perl scripts unless they give their approval. This isn’t ideal because it means that you may have to wait for them to give you the OK before implementing a new feature on your website. If you want to customize error pages, you want to have .htaccess. Same is true if you want to prevent bandwidth theft and hot linking. If you want to have a blog, or a content management system, you need MySQL. Telnet access or SSH are good for testing scripts and maintaining databases. Cron is actually a program scheduler that allows you to run programs at certain intervals, like once a day. This can be very useful, so don’t give it up without a good reason.
If you’re running an e-commerce site, make sure your hosting account comes with secure sockets layer (SSL) and a shopping cart program. Sometimes these will cost you a little extra. A little extra is fine, but don’t let them gouge you. If you want to have customers pay by credit card, then you need SSL for security or else nobody will risk shopping there.
OK, we might as well cover price. In many ways, web hosting is a “you get what you pay for” prospect. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t compare prices. There are several websites, such as web hosting (see screen shot) that put up head to head comparisons based on several factors. Free web hosting should generally be reserved for things like personal sites, and non-commercial uses. Free web hosting always involves agreeing to having banner ads on your page and let’s just say some of those banner ads aren’t the kind of thing you would want customers (or your grandma) to have to look at.
Other Considerations
Most webmasters like to have a control panel that allows them to manage parts of your web account yourself. You should be able to add and delete email addresses and change passwords at a very minimum. If you choose a host where you have to go through tech support each time you want to change a password or add an email account, it’s going to get very frustrating very quickly. If you’re interested in reselling web space or hosting subdomains, make sure your hosting provider offers this and how much it costs. And finally, it may matter to you what kind of server your site is hosted on. There are specific situations (such as writing or using ASP programs) that require you to choose a Windows server. Otherwise, you can choose between Windows and Linux servers.
