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Choosing Your Hosting Company
Choosing Your Hosting Company
by Ray Gonzalez, President 9Second Technologies.
Choosing a hosting company is one of the most important and often difficult decisions website owners have to make. Most people don't realize that a hosting company can make or break any website. Many website owners are often frustrated, after investing in a website, marketing it and submitting it to the search engines only to find out that the website is down more than it is up. We put this guide together to help you make an educated decision when choosing a web host. It will help teach you the questions to ask your current or potential hosting company.
Reliability and speed of access
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% (even 99% is actually kind of low - it really should be 99.5% or higher). The host should provide some sort of refund (i.e. 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.
Data Transfer or Bandwidth (Traffic)
Data Transfer (sometimes loosely referred to as "traffic" or "bandwidth") is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site. Don't believe any host that advertises "unlimited bandwidth". The host has to pay for the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, they will not silently bear your costs. Many high bandwidth websites have found this out the hard way when they suddenly receive an exorbitant bill for having "exceeded" the "unlimited bandwidth". Always look for details on how much traffic the package allows. I personally always stay clear of any host that advertises "unlimited transfer", even if the exact amount is specified somewhere else (sometimes buried in their policy statements). To give you a rough idea, most new sites that are not software archives or the like use less than 1000 Megabytes of bandwidth per month. Your traffic requirements will grow over time, as your site becomes more well-known (and well-linked), so you will need to also check their policy for overages: is there a published charge per 1000 MB over the allowed bandwidth? Is the charge made according to actual usage or are you expected to prepay for a potential overage? It is better not to go for hosts that expect you to prepay for overages, since it is very hard to foresee when your site will exceed its bandwidth and by how much.
Disk space
For the same reason as bandwidth, watch out also for those "unlimited disk space" schemes. Most sites need less than 5MB of web space, so even the hosting company tempts you with 200MB or 600MB (or "unlimited space"), be aware that you are unlikely to use that space, so don't let the 600MB space be too big a factor in your consideration when comparing with other web hosts. The hosting company is also aware of that, which is why they feel free to offer you that as a means of enticing you to host there
Technical support
Do they offer technical support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (often abbreviated 24/7)? Note that I would not accept a host which does not have staff working on Sundays: it means that if your site has problems on a Saturday after the staff goes home, your problems will span 3 days (an eternity on the web) till the support staff return to work on Monday. Incidentally, just because a host advertises that it has 24/7 support does not necessarily mean that it really has that kind of support. Test them out by emailing at midnight and on Saturday nights, Sunday mornings, etc. Check out how long they take to respond. Besides speed of responses, check to see if they are technically competent. You wouldn't want to sign up for a host that is run by a bunch of salesmen who only how to sell and not fix problems.
FTP, ASP, .NET, CGI, PHP, Cold Fusion
If you are paying for a site, you really should make sure you have all of these. Note that some commercial hosts do not allow you to install ASP and CGI scripts without their approval. This is not desirable since it means that you have to wait for them before you can implement a feature on your site. Check to see if these facilities are provided.
SSL (secure server), SQL, MySQL, Shopping Cart
If you are planning on doing any sort of business through your web site, you might want to look out to see if the host provides these facilities. Some hosts only provide it with a higher priced option, while others charge extra for these. Check to see if these features are available at all before you commit to the hosting company. You will definitely need SSL if you plan to collect credit card information on your site.
Email, Auto-responders, POP3, Mail Forwarding, Web Mail
If you have your own site, you would probably want to have email addresses at your own domain, like sales@mydomain.com, etc. Does the hosting company provide this with the package? Do they allow you to have a catchall email account that allows anyname@yourdomain.com to wind up being routed to you? Can you set an email address to automatically reply to the sender with a preset message (called an auto responder)? Can you retrieve your mail with your email software? Can it be automatically forwarded to your current email address? Can you access your email form any computer with internet access?
Control Panel/Administrative Console
This is called various names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and 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.
Price
while price is always a factor, you should realize that you often get what you pay for, although it's not necessarily true that the most expensive hosts are the best.
When you sign up for a monthly service, there is usually no fixed length contract, so you can terminate your contract at any time. Your commitment is month to month although you often will get a discount if you sign up for 1-2 years.
If you follow these basic guidelines, you will have a reliable, efficient and satisfying hosting service that will contribute to the success of your business for many years to come.
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"These guys aren't just a technology shop. They helped us define our corporate identity as well as develop technology that allows us to expand our business with little effort."
-Mike Cappiello
Internexxt Solutions
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