by: Karolis Petreikis
Nowadays, anybody can afford to order a feature-packed web hosting plan for next to nothing; however, affordable price is not the only criterion which should be considered when purchasing web hosting services. In this article, I'll explain the basics of what you should look for in choosing a web hosting company, not just concentrating on the best price and features, but also on reliability and honesty. You're investing your money and effort into finding paying customers and you wouldn't like to lose them in order to save a few dollars per month on a web hosting service.
When looking for a web hosting company, it doesn’t matter if this is just for the inception of a web or the move of an established site; you need to consider a large selection of criteria to determine which company to go with:
Customer support
Website hosting service isn’t just storage or bandwidth. Based on personal experience and that of others, even a top-notch service is worthless without customer support. If you own a business website, your hosting provider needs to be there for you 24/7 and give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your problem; otherwise, you may end up losing customers and money.
Downtime guarantee and service monitoring
Having a personal website go down is a minor inconvenience; having a business website go down is a serious matter. What amount of profit would you lose if your site had been down for a week? Long downtime may be very harmful to today's companies which spend large amounts of money on advertising their websites. Essentially, there are two rules regarding reliability that one should look at:
1. You should check if there is an uptime guarantee offered. A truly service-oriented provider will also give a money-back guarantee, offering a discount or free service as compensation for downtime. Any company which avoids taking responsibility won't put much effort into the service.
2. I definitely wouldn't go with a company claiming 100% uptime, as there is no such thing as a server with 100% uptime. If anyone ever claims their server has a 100% uptime they are either lying or they don't perform the necessary upgrades that prevent a machine from being compromised.
Reputable web hosts will post statistics on their site: What is the frequency of interruption? How about the average percentage of downtime? If these aren’t posted, ask; if the answer isn’t forthcoming, that should be a warning sign. If you still go with a host which doesn't monitor servers, you'll have to do the monitoring yourself. I recommend http://www.siteuptime.com, as it's one of the best monitoring services available for free in the market today.
Backups
There is no host which is safe against different types of technical and programical failures, so make sure that the company runs scheduled backups. The other advice would be always having a backup of your website yourself, as you never know what might happen. cPanel, which is the most popular web hosting management software at this time, has a very comfortable backup-making tool. It allows you to backup files and databases quickly and easily, so backups are no longer a problem.
Acceptable use policy
Web hosts may have 200-300 or more clients per server; there is no exact number, as companies have different hardware and each hosted website has different resource usage. There always is a possibility that a few of those customers host illegal content. There are web hosts who have had their servers unplugged, resulting in their clients’ websites going down. I'm sure you don't want to put your business at risk and have your website hosted on the same server together with illegal pornography and software sites, so check host's acceptable use policy to find out, if the host takes care of what's hosted on their servers.
Hosting your site on an uncared-for server will also result in a low speed. If somebody on the same server sends spam, the server's IP address will be blacklisted and you'll have serious problems as recipients stop receiving your emails. Use the "Spam database lookup" feature on www.DNSstuff.com to check if a web hosting company is blacklisted. Spam is being sent almost everywhere, so having one or two red records isn't that bad; but, if there are more, it may become a problem later on.
Unlimited bandwidth and web space
In web hosting industry, the adage "you get what you pay for" is almost universally applicable. Do not fall for hosts offering unlimited allowances, as there is no unlimited bandwidth, nor unlimited web space. Host's pay for each GB of bandwidth themselves. Hard drives also aren't free, so how can they say it's unlimited? They simply are performing false advertising in order to attract customers. The average website doesn't use more than 1GB of bandwidth per month; the customer is happy as he bought something "unlimited" and the host gets a new customer, which won't cost them any more than $1-2 USD per month. But imagine what would happen if I had a website, burning much more bandwidth than an average site does, and I signed up with a hosting company offering unlimited traffic? The host would simply suspend my account and tell me, that it was using too much bandwidth. There even are companies which offer unlimited bandwidth and have a statement on their terms of service, explaining that unlimited bandwidth means 40GB, for example.
Will you really own your domain name?
When you buy a domain name together with a website hosting package, make sure the host will register the domain name under your name. It usually should be written in their FAQ, but, if there is no such information, simply contact them. This will also give you an opportunity to check how fast their customer support team replies to inquiries. If the hosting company registers domains under someone else's name, you may have problems switching hosting providers later. If you were in such situation, you would have to file for a Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which costs much more than both domain name and web hosting service together.
Control Panel
For ease of maintenance, a feature called a Control Panel is a necessity; this tool will normally allow for regular maintenance, be it email mailbox additions/deletions, password resets, web additions, web count reports, statistics and so on. If the site is for any sort of business, this is an absolute must. The most popular web hosting management software currently available is cPanel. It's a next-generation web hosting control panel system that allows you to manage your domain through a web interface. The idea is to transfer as much of the control of managing your web site to you; you have the ability to manage all aspects of e-mail, files, backup, FTP, CGI scripts, and web site statistics.
Value-added services
Hosting companies offer different value-added services in order to set themselves apart from the competition. Of course, these are an advantage, but a common mistake customers make is choosing a host just because it offers many value-added services which won't be used anyway. Some of the really useful features are:
1. Auto-installer script – Auto-installers will save you time if you are going to install a forum, image gallery, content management system, etc. Installation procedures on an auto-installer script take seconds and can be performed by novices without the need of doing difficult tasks usually associated with installations.
2. Online website builder - It lets you design a website in a few minutes without having any creation software and knowledge. One very powerful website builder on the market is Site Studio; this editor allows for ease of use, full control of color schemes and themes, one-click publishing, and an array of templates to use.
The last tip
In this article, I've mentioned only a few warning signs which are worth considering. You should know yourself that price and allocations aren't as important as the quality of service; if the budget is absolutely limited, then the price can be a valid criterion, but otherwise it shouldn’t receive much credence.
By going through this article and asking questions, you can narrow down the list of web hosts to the point where a good, sound decision can be easily made.
About the author:
Karolis Petreikis is the CEO of http://www.uphosted.com- a company that provides reliable hosting services for both individuals and businesses.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
How to Choose a Web Hosting Company
Choosing a Web host
by: Petr Sejba
There are some simple rules to follow when looking for a web host. The first rules is to avoid free hosts whenever possible, it is easy to think that a free service is preferable to paying a monthly fee however with web hosting this is defiantly not the case.
Paid hosting has several important advantages over free hosting. Firstly you will receive more useful features with paid hosting. Technical support will be much better with help available when you need it. Generally speaking Paid hosts will have much faster connections to the internet so your site will appear quicker. Most importantly with paid hosting you won't have to display a banner on each page advertising the Hosting Company and advertising to the world that you are on a free host. With excellent hosting packages starting from $6.99 per month there is no reason why you shouldn't go with a paid host.
The second simple rule concerns what operating system to choose. You will find hosts offering you Windows Hosting or Linux Hosting, it is tempting to choose windows as it's a name everyone knows and many people mistakenly believe that because their PC runs windows they need a Windows Host but in this case they'd be wrong. Whichever hosting package you choose you will receive a control panel through which you administer your site these are graphical environments through which you can control many aspects of your website from configuring your web mail and installing forum software to creating a database. Take a lead from the marble halls of business most major companies host their websites on Linux Servers. Linux Servers generally runs faster and are more secure than a windows server. This is partly due to how the operating systems are built. Windows try to include every possible function in the base package whilst Linux allows the host company to add the functions they need.
The final thing to consider when choosing a host is the list of features they offer. If you don't know much about html you can look for a host that supplies you with free website building software and some of the better ones will even supply free Domain names. You should look at a number of different companies and compare what they offer as standard with their hosting plans. Technical aspects to consider are; the amount of disk space available to you and how much monthly bandwidth you have to use. Look at how many email accounts you can have the more the better. Customer support features should not be overlooked check to see what their response time is and if it's anymore than an hour look elsewhere, also consider if they offer a money back guarantee.
Look to see what additional services they include in the package for example do they offer daily backups? Make sure that they offer support for PHP as this is quickly becoming the programming language of choice with web programmers.
To conclude when choosing a website Host look for a paid host with Linux hosting and then compare the packages on offer from a variety of companies.
About the author:
Petr Sejba is owner of Marble Host ( http://www.MarbleHost.com), a Web Hosting Company offering 99.9 % Uptime Guarantee, 24/7 Support with 1 hour Response Guarantee, Free Domain Name, Generous Disk Space and Bandwidth, Web Site Builder and more at affordable prices.
Useful Tips When Applying For A Web Host Provider
by: Ispas Marin
Once you have considered the design for your website and it is ready to be hosted, there are some matters to be considered when choosing the adequate web host:
I - Accessibility of the site?
Once you have applied for a web host provider you should take several aspects into account such as the time it takes to load or the period of time it is up.These aspects are very important because if there are problems related to them, this can create extreme annoyance and renouncement of the possible visitors.
The same possible visitors can also have problems in finding your web page, as search engines do not show those who are always down or have difficulties in loading.
The best method to acknowledge if a server is usually up would be to take a look over the reviews written by other persons who have applied for the server before you.
II - Does the provider offer SSL??
In the case of a hobby websiter or, in other words, if you will not be making any transactions on that particular website, the SSL protection is not necessary.In the other case, if transactions should be made in the near future it is necessary for you to choose the webhost which includes the SSL protection upfront.
SSL is generally used for encrypting any piece of information such as:credit card codes, names, etc.
Deciding to subscribe to a webhost which does not comprise of SSL protection and choosing afterwards to have it installed, could turn up to be more expensive than having applied for a webhost which provides SSL in the first place.
Websiters which have Automatic SSL protection can be exemplified by www.powweb.com and www.ipowerweb.com
III - Is server side scripting available from the server?
Despite of the fact that these server side scripting is provided by almost all servers, it is still advisable to check out if they do.Pages changing in real time are given the chance to be created by the webmasters due to the server side scripting.
For instance, in the case of running a business and having all products arranged in a database, the server side scripting will give off the pages by means of the ranges the customers choose to see.
You should not think of using a server which does not provide functionality for a server side scripting. www.powweb.com and www.ipowerweb.com can also be shown as examples for sites which comprise of servers side scripting.
IV - Customer Support
The support given to customers is of an utmost importance when choosing a web hoser.Even in the case of an experienced webmaster, I am sure that there are still some questions to be asked when signing up with a website.Some of them have created special forums for frequently asked questions(FAQ-S).Actually the only one of this type I found up to now is www.powweb.com.
Even tough these aspects are widely known, the attention should be drawn anyway, for there are many persons who pay significant sums after having signed to a web hoster on the basis of having ignored these conditions.Taken this into account, the collaboration should be nothing but successfully.
About the author:
For great web hosting packages, domain names, great customer support just visit us at http://www.domainsforall.co.uk
