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Whatever you want to do on the web whether it’s produce a site for the family, a personal blog or a full-blown business website, the most important part of the operation is the hosting company who will look after the server and storage space where your web site lives.
If you want the world at large to see your site them the Domain Name is important, too, but, especially if you’re producing a site for a business or one that you hope will make money, it’s obviously essential that the hosting company is solid, reliable and offers good support.
Feature List
There is actually a long list of features you can check off when looking at hosting companies. Many of these are technical considerations such as support for GCI (which lets you run scripts on the server), support or PHP, Perl (scripting languages) and MySQL (for database applications) to mention but a few.
Do you get email, an auto responder, can you add sub domains and, indeed, how many top level domains can you host in your web space?
It’s not quite true to say that all ‘major’ hosting companies offer all the bells and whistles but most do, although, as is usually the case, you may have to pay a bit extra for some features.
Below we look at some of the not-so-technical aspects of hosting that you should consider.
Host For Free!
But first, if you don’t want to spend any money at all, you can get free hosting! Although the web space is free, such companies recover their costs by advertising on your site. This may be fine for a personal site but a no-no if it’s for business.
The Two Biggest Considerations
The two other important factors in hosting are web space and bandwidth.
Web space is the amount of hard disk space you get to store your web pages. Again, if you’re putting up a small site, you won’t need much web space but do plan for future expansion. A small site will probably use under 10Mb of disk space.
Bandwidth is the amount of traffic to your site. Free hosting will invariably impose a bandwidth limit and even paid-for hosting will have limits, too. It’ common now for hosting companies to advertise unlimited bandwidth but if you read the small print you’ll find they are not really unlimited.
Again, personal and family sites for sharing photos won’t use much bandwidth (but beware of uploading large videos that will quickly eat into your bandwidth allowance) but if you want as many visitors as possible - and most site-owners do - then you need a respectable bandwidth allowance.
The exact amount is difficult to gauge as it will vary enormously depending on how much content is on the site and, of course, how many visitors it gets, but a personal site may use less than 100Mb/month while an averagely busy site might easily use over 1 or 2Gb.
Reliability & Support
Reliability is obviously important, more so if you’re running a business site. Many hosting companies boast a minimum of 99% uptime. That sounds good but it means almost 15 minutes of downtime in every 24 hour period. Again, this may not be so important to you if it’s a personal site. However, you might want to look for a company that promises 99.5% uptime.
Technical support is a thorny issue in the computing world. Many hosting companies promise 24/7 support but not all actually have technical staff working throughout the night and at weekends.
The Price Is Right
Price is the last item on our list. As with most things, price and value can be quite different. There are many low-cost hosting companies out there but not all are reliable. Some stuff so many sites onto their servers that the sites are slow to load. Others have little technical support. Some tempt you in by offering ‘unlimited’ features but catch you in the small print.
Google is your friend here. Google for hosting forums and see what sort of experience other people are having. Peer recommendations - and warnings - will help you select the best hosting company for you and your needs.
