|
What are some of the things you should look for
when choosing a web host? The criteria for choosing a free web host and a
commercial web hosting solution are slightly different although they do overlap. If you are only interested in one of these types,
you can simply skip to the appropriate section. I have written these sections to
be as independent of the other as possible.
Choosing a Free Web Host
-
Advertising
Most free web hosts impose advertising on your website. This is done to
cover the costs of providing your site the free web space and associated
services. Some hosts require you to place a banner on your pages, others
display a window that pops up every time a page on your site loads, while still
others impose an advertising frame on your site. There is really no hard and
fast rule which is to be preferred: some people hate a pop-up window, other
webmasters dislike having to stuff banner codes onto their pages, and many
people cannot stand an advertising frame (which may cause problems when you
submit your website to search engines). Whichever method is used, check that
you're comfortable with the method.
-
Amount of web space
Does it have enough space for your needs? If
you envisage that you will expand your site eventually, you might want to
cater for future expansion. Most sites use less than 5MB of web space.Your needs will vary, depending on how many
pictures your pages use, whether you need sound files, video clips, etc.
-
FTP access
Some free hosting providers only allow you to design your page with their
online builder. While this is useful for beginners, do you have the option to
expand later when you become experienced and their online page builder does
not have the facility you need? FTP access, or at the very least, the ability
to upload your pages by email or browser, is needed. Personally, I feel FTP
access is mandatory, except for the most trivial site.
-
File type and size limitations
Watch out for these. Some free hosts impose a maximum size on each of the
files you upload (including one with a low of 200KB). Other sites restrict the
file types you can upload to HTML and GIF/JPG files. If your needs are
different, eg, if you want to distribute your own programs on your pages, you
will have to look elsewhere.
-
Reliability and speed of access
This is extremely important. A site that is frequently down will lose a lot
of visitors. If someone finds your site on the search engine, and he tries to
access it but find that it is down, he'll simply go down the list to find
another site. Slow access is also very frustrating for visitors (and for you
too, when you upload your site). How do you know if a host is reliable or
fast? If you can't get feedback from anyone, one way is to try it out yourself
over a period of time, both during peak as well as non-peak hours. After all,
it is free, so you can always experiment with it.
-
CGI-BIN access / PHP
This is not particularly crucial nowadays for a free web host, since there
are so many free CGI hosting services available that provide counters, search
engines, forms, polls, mailing lists, etc, without requiring you to dabble
with Perl or PHP scripts.
However if you really want to do it yourself, with the minimum of
advertising banners from these free providers, you will need either PHP or
CGI-BIN access. Note that it is not enough to know they provide PHP or CGI-BIN
access: you need to know the kind of environment your scripts run under: is it
so restrictive that they are of no earthly use? For PHP scripts, does your web
host allow you to use the mail() function? For Perl CGI scripts, do you have
access to send mail or its work alike?
-
Bandwidth allotment
Nowadays, many free web hosts impose a limit on the amount of traffic your
website can use per day and per month. This means that if the pages (and
graphic images) on your site is loaded by visitors beyond a certain number of
times per day (or per month), the web host will disable your web site (or
perhaps send you a bill). It is difficult to recommend a specific minimum
amount of bandwidth, since it depends on how you design your site, your target
audience, and the number of visitors you're able to attract to your site. In
general, 100MB traffic per month is too little for anything other than your
personal home page and 1-3GB traffic per month is usually adequate for a
simple site just starting out. Your mileage, however, will vary.
Choosing a Commercial Web Host
-
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%. In
fact, even 99% is actually too low - it really should be 99.5% or higher. The
host should provide some sort of refund (eg 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 (Traffic/Bandwidth)
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 commercial web 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). Usually you will
find that they redefine "unlimited" to be limited in some way.
To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website,
most new sites that are not software archives or the like use less than 3GB 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 GB over the allowed
bandwidth? Is the charge made according to actual usage or are you expected to
pre-pay 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 if you are provided with a host that tempts you with
200MB or 500MB (or "unlimited space"), be aware that you are unlikely to use
that space, so don't let the 500MB 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
Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (often
abbreviated 24/7), all year around? Note that I will not accept a host which
does not have staff working on weekends or public holidays. You will be
surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times.
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, PHP, Perl CGI-BIN access, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH crontabs
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 PHP or 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.
".htaccess" is needed if you are to customize your error pages (pages that display when, say, a
user requests for a non-existent page on your site) or to protect your site in
various ways (such as to prevent bandwidth theft and hot linking, etc). Telnet or SSH
access is useful for certain things, including testing CGI scripts,
maintaining databases, etc. Cron jobs may be needed for programs that you need
to be run periodically (e.g. once a day). Check to see if these facilities are
provided.
-
SSL (secure server), MySQL, Shopping Cart
If you are planning on doing any sort of business through your website, you
might want to look out to see if the host provides these facilities. These
facilities normally involve a higher priced package or additional charges. The
main thing is to check to see if they are available at all before you commit
to the host. You will definitely need SSL if you plan to collect credit card
information on your site.
-
Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding
If you have your own site, you would probably want to have email addresses
at your own domain, like sales@yourdomain.com, etc. Does the host provide this
with the package? Does it allow you to have a catch-all 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?
-
Control Panel
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. I
would not go for a host where I have to go through their technical support
each time I want to change a password or add/delete an email account. Such
chores are common maintenance chores that every webmaster performs time and
time again, and it would be a great hassle if you had to wait for their
technical support to make the changes for you.
-
Sub domains, virtual hosting
For those who are thinking of selling web space or having multiple domains
or sub domains hosted in your account, you should look to see if they provide
this, and the amount extra that they charge for this (whether it is a one-time
or monthly charge, etc).
-
Server
Is the type of operating system and server important? Whether you think so
or not on the theoretical level, there are a few practical reasons for looking
out for the type of server.
In general, if you want to use things like ASP, you have no choice but to
look for a Windows NT/2000/XP machine for your server.
Otherwise my preference is to sign up for accounts using the often cheaper,
more stable and feature-laden Unix systems running the Apache server. In fact,
if dynamically generated pages that can access databases (etc) is what you
want, you can always use the more portable (and popular) PHP instead of tying
yourself down to ASP. Another reason to prefer Unix-based web hosts (which
include web hosts using systems like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc)
using the Apache web server is that these servers allow you to configure a
lot of facilities that you typically need on your site (error pages,
protecting your images, blocking email harvesters, blocking IP addresses,
etc) without having to ask your web host to implement them.
-
Price
I was actually hesitant to list this, but I guess it's futile not to.
However, I would caution that 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.
-
Monthly/Quarterly/Annual Payment Plans
Most web hosts allow you to select an annual payment plan that gives you a
cheaper rate than if you were to pay monthly. My current personal preference
is to pay monthly with all new web hosts until I'm assured of their
reliability and honesty. Paying monthly allows me to switch web hosts quickly
when I find that the current host does not meet my requirements: this way, I'm
not tied down to a bad web host because I have prepaid for an entire year. I
do this even if the new web host guarantees that they will refund the balance
if I'm dissatisfied, since at the point I sign up, I have no assurance that
they will honor their guarantee. Later (usually after many months or even
more than a year), when I'm satisfied with the host, I often change payment
plans to the discounted annual plans.
-
Resellers?
Not all hosting companies own or lease their own web servers. Some of them
are actually resellers for some other hosting company. The disadvantage of
using a reseller is the possibility that you are dealing with people who don't
know much about the system they are selling and who take longer to help you
(they have to transmit your technical support request to the actual hosting
company for it to be acted upon). However, this also depends on both the
reseller and the underlying hosting company. It is thus wise not to rule out
all resellers; there are a number of reliable and fast ones who are actually
quite good and cheap. In fact, a number of resellers sell the same packages
cheaper than their original hosting company. If you find out that a particular
company is a reseller, you will need to investigate both the
reseller and the real hosting company.
-
International
If you don't stay in the USA, you have the option of hosting your site with
some local provider. The advantage here is the ease of dealing with them (they
are after all easily accessible by phone call or a visit), your familiarity
with the local laws and easy recourse to those laws should it be necessary. It
should be your choice if your target audience is local (eg a local fast food
delivery service). On the other hand, hosting it in USA has the advantage of
faster access for what is probably the largest number of your overseas
visitors (particularly if you have an English-speaking audience). You also
have a large number of hosting companies to choose from, and as a result,
cheaper prices too.
|
|
