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Choosing the company that will be hosting your website is one of the most important decisions that you will make regarding your web property. If you are building the site for a business, whether the online presence of your brick and mortar business, or a completely online business, then you want to make sure that your website is available when your customers want to use it.
There are some things that you should look for in a host. I am going to list my preferences as as it goes with control panels as such as I feel that they make the running of a website site easy enough for any one to do.
Customer Service
The hosting company should have multiple ways for their customers to contact the people that they need to. The company should have a phone number, online "chat" support and a ticketing system as a minimum.
I suggest trying to chat with the "live chat" a few times to ensure that there is someone there. It is not acceptable if your site is down by no fault of your own and there is no one online to chat with you in real time.
Uptime
The host should ensure 99.9% uptime as a minimum, and there should be refunds given when this is not reached.
Before you just take that number you see on the homepage for granted, read the fine print. If the hosting company measures the uptime over the past year, then your site could be down for 8 hours continuously and as long as the host had a good record up till that point then you are not going to get any refund. If the uptime is measured monthly you have a better idea on the consistent integrity of the host.
What HAS to be included
There are some things that HAVE to be included in the hosting package before you get started, and this doesn’t matter what the price point is.
Disk Space: At least 1gig
Bandwidth: 100 gigs
FTP Accounts: Unlimited
Email Accounts: Unlimited
MySQL Databases: Unlimited
Website / Ftp Statistics
And CPanel for the backend control panel
What you should look for
Above I mentioned some items that you should have no matter what hosting company which you decide to partner with. Below are some additional options that all good hosting companies offer with their packages.
Addon Domains – This is one way to have multiple websites with one hosting account. You can add a domain within the control panel and it will be completely separate from the way it looks from the outside world.
Fantastico – This is an amazing tool. It really simplifies the installation of some of the most popular scripts that you will want to have installed on your site, including Wordpress, Drupal, phpBB, etc. You can install the scripts with 3 clicks of the mouse and then upgrade them with a single click when updates become available and highly recommend it.
phpMyAdmin – This is another tool that I don’t think that I could live without. phpMyAdmin is a user interface for working with mySQL databases. If you ever have to dig into the database that drives your site then this is something that you need.
No Contract – There should not be a minimum time period that you are going to be with the hosting company
Money Back Guarantee – There should be a limited time money back guarantee for the service that you are subscribing to. This is important because you want the chance to test the waters without committing.
NO SET UP FEES – For a shared hosting account the company should not charge setup fees. I have run a reseller host in the past and know that there is only 5 minutes of time to set up a new account, and that is if it is done manually. There is many tools available to automate this, therefore you should not have to pay extra to have the privilege of using someone’s service.
Conclusion
So what does all this mean?
It does seem to be a lot of information, but it is usually easy to tell a good hosting company from a fly by night. One is the too good to be true promises. These are teasers and are there to get you to sign up and hope to get some money out of you before you wise up and move on. Early in my online career I was caught in these promises and moved hosts a lot. It is not fun moving your website, and if you don’t do it just right there is going to be some downtime associated with the move.
If you want my recommendation, I use Hostgator. I have used them for the last couple of years and they meet all of my recommendations and a lot more. They are a large hosting company with a lot of servers that are spread over multiple datacentres. And there CEO is still very involved with their customer service, and not just the big accounts, all of them.
Your comments
So for those that have been around for the last while, what do you think? Who do you use and why? Is there anything that I missed that you think is required?
One of the first things that have to be decided when you are getting ready to start a website, whether if it is for a personal site, business site, or a hobby site is whether you are going to host the site yourself and or a hosted service.
If you are building a blog type site this is not as critical at the start. You can easily start your site on a free hosted blog site and then if you feel it necessary you can more to a hoste solution with minimal headache. Just make sure that you have your own domain so that you don’t lose too many links that you have built.
Difference between the two. Hosted like going with a host like Hostgator and between a hosted, wordpress.com, blogger, etc
Advantages of the hosted service.
- Don’t need to have any programming experience
- Don’t need to worry about keeping the programs up-to-date
- Minimal backend work needed
- Usually lots of easy to installed themes, and styles
- Security, hosted services are typically very secure.
Disadvantages of hosted service
- You don’t have control of what is used for the site
- You can’t customize certain aspects of the site
- Even though there are plugins and extensions available what you can do with the site is limited.
Advantages of using a host
- You can pretty much put anything that you want online
- You have much great control of the way the site looks and interacts with your audience
- You can use the host for your FTP, email, and many other services that the hosted version does not have
- There are many “unlimited” hosts that allow you to store large amounts of data at no extra cost.
Disadvantages of using a host
- If you are not careful, you may find that the site is down more than it is up.
- Customer service may be a nightmare (Although Hostgator is an exception to this. They have done everything they can to make my life on their servers enjoyable) .
- There may be bandwidth limitations.
- The cost can be huge if you have a popular site with little revenue as the bandwidth charges can get expensive.
- You are responsible for ensuring that your site is secure.
Conclusions
It really depends on what you are planning on using the site for. If you are only interested in a content site or a personal site that you can communicate with family etc. They a hosted service, or using many different hosted services to serve the purposes that you need for them.
This can include services like Wordpress.com, Flickr.com blogger.com, etc. If you are interested in having a custom site programmed, want to have a email address with your domain or want to have the choice of how the site works. If you want to have full control over the type of content, visitors, the script on the site etc then you are going to be looking for something that is hosted. The other thing that you have to remember is that if you want to ensure that you have FULL control over the content of the site then you want to fully control the host. The hosted services typically have a TOS stating that they do not assume any risk if you lose everything.
Thoughts?
So you know what I think, what do you think? Let me know in the comments below.
Cheers, JM
Today I found an interesting resource on cheap web hosting.
There are a lot of places that a beginner can get information on the different types of hosting that is available out there. A lot of those resources are too “full”. WebHostingRating articles is very well organized and has some great articles and tutorials.
I have had some time to browse through some of them and the following are some of the articles that I believe would be the most useful to the beginner:
Shared hosting is the type of hosting that a beginner is most likely to use. It is the most cost effective and easiest to obtain.
cPanel is the control panel of choice when it comes to the backend of your website. It is very easy to use, but this article will help you get a head start when you have finially decided on the webhost that you are going to be starting with.
Fantastico is known as a popular library for commercial scripts. It is commonly used as a third party add-on that works with cPanel. It was designed to automatically install applications into a website and eliminate the need to upload files through FTP. These scripts are executed from the administrative area of your website. Websites running Fantastico scripts are said to be installed by over 10, 000 servers. With millions of users on a global scale it is easily the most used product of its kind.
myPHPadmin is not something that the absolute beginner is going to be using, but take a read because you never know when you are going to have to use it to change a variable in one of you database tables.
Conclusion
All in all, WebHostingRating Articles is a decent new resource that looks like it is going to be growing in the future. Make sure to add its feed to your reader so that you will be notified when new articles are added.
Then when you have figured out what hosting is all about then you can go to the cheap web hostingpage and figure out what webhost you are going to go with.
