Choosing a Web Host, Get What You Need

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Setting up and maintaining web servers can be an expensive and complicated undertaking for any company. There are countless technologies that you need to be ready to set up immediately. If you need to get a site live quickly or cheaply, it can be nea

Choosing a Web Host, Get What You Need

So you have decided that you need a web page. Setting up your own server can waste your time and money when there are so many hosts ready to put your site on internet. The problem is that there are so many, and to some shoppers, there is a lot of technical jargon that can get in the way of picking the right one. This article is meant to simplify matters a bit by giving a reasonable way to gauge a web host’s value, not to promote any particular hosts.

The most important step to choosing a host is the first one. You must decide exactly what you need the web page to do. This will determine exactly what you need from a host. Ask yourself a few questions:

Is this going to be a business, organization, or personal site?
How devastating is it to me, my business, or my organization if the website is offline for several hours every month?
Will this site need to sell things or will it possibly sell things in the future?
Will it need forums, hit counters, or other server side scripts?
There are more factors in what will determine the best host for you, but this touches on most of them. Primarily, you will need to assess hosts in four areas: reliability, features, customer support, and finally price.

If this is a personal website that is just for fun, you may not need anything more than the webspace that comes included with your ISP service (AOL, Verizon, Adelphia, etc.). You may even be happy with free services. However, for those with a more serious need for a website, like a business or organization or archive of information, those kind of sites can be insufficient. Sometimes their terms of service even prohibit commercial use on those types of servers. For most purposes beyond a personal page, you will need to look at commercial hosting solutions.
Of those factors we need to consider, let’s first look at reliability. No web host can have 100% uptime, and it’s impossible to guarantee. Avoid any hosts promising more than they can deliver. Any number of factors can take the system offline, including routine maintenance or server upgrades. The ideal is to reduce the amount of downtime so your site can be minimally impacted. Also, hosts can be slow during peak times, which may frustrate and turn away visitors, but this can be a harder thing to determine than uptime.

The importance of reliability goes back to how you answered the question concerning how devastating downtime can be. Consider that a search engine can be crawling sites any time. If your site is down, it will not be indexed. Search engines often make a few attempts to spider a page that existed before, but if your server is unreliable, your search engine ranking may be as well.

More seriously, if your website is any form of business, downtime can kill it. If for instance you sell bikes on the page, visitors coming to shop or research bikes on your site are all lost when the site is down. With so many sites selling bikes online that are only a click away, it’s very easy to lose a sale. There are not many things about a website that can truly indicate the professionalism of a company, but an unreliable website will definitely warn people of an unreliable businesses.

Also, if your site relies on advertising to make money, downtime means that you have no money coming in. Visitors mean ad impressions and click-throughs. Without them, your income will dry up as well as your advertisers.

So, for any online business, uptime is critical. You absolutely cannot go with a host that has an uptime of less than 95%. Some people recommend staying with hosts promising at least 99% uptime. Often hosts will offer a guaranteed uptime and will refund all or part of your monthly fee if they fall below it. You will often pay more for a host with this promise, but it can be worth the extra money you may spend. Those hosts have a vested interest in keeping your site online and profitable.

For organizations, like non-profit groups, reliability depends on what the website is designed to do for your visitors. It is not as critical to be online all the time as it is for ecommerce, but certainly you don’t want to be stuck with an unreliable host making your organization look bad or keeping visitors away.

If your site is of a personal nature, reliability is as important as you make it. You could deal with a cheap host that is slow during peak times or even is offline now and then. Your livelihood is not dependant on it, so try to weigh reliability a little less than other factors.
Features can often be either necessary of frivolous. One often frivolous feature people weigh too heavily is the amount of web space available. The average website is 2 to 3 MB. Most websites will never be able to exceed the range of 5 to 10 MB in size. Although this doesn t sound like much, consider that a website can be nothing more than some text files, images, and a little flash or java code. A large website can easily be made in far less than 5 MB. Avoid paying more for large amounts of web space unless you intend to use your website for downloading or streaming media, such as videos and audio. Often, web hosts advertise that they offer 300 MB for example, while they know you will only ever use 5 MB. Do not let large amounts of space sell you; you will likely end up paying for empty space.

A factor that is more important to consider is the bandwidth that your site will need. If you are just starting your site, traffic will be low until you start getting more links and search engine listings. Once your site gets more popular, your web space provider may shut off your site (or send you an extra bill) for letting people load your site more times than your plan had included. Make sure you know how much bandwidth you have and find out if you can purchase extra bandwidth later when your site gets more traffic. As a general guide, if your site does not use streaming or downloadable media, 3 GB of bandwidth should be sufficient unless you become very popular. Also, avoid any “unlimited” bandwidth deals; the web host has to pay for that bandwidth, and nothing is free.

If you are paying for a website, you should definitely be getting email accounts and FTP access. Don’t settle for a site without them. Make sure the email addresses are for your domain (i.e. contact@bikeshop.com) and not at your host’s domain (i.e. contact-bikeshop@myhost.com). Also, the host should support autoresponders. FTP access is critical is you intend to do any amount of uploading files to your server. Don’t settle for web applications. Also, you will want a host that provides a user control over these two features. It’s too much hassle to get customer service to change a password or set up properties, so find one that automates this for you.

If you plan to sell things on your site, you will definitely need a server with SSL (security features), MySQL, and an included shopping cart. This will necessitate a high priced plan, but they are necessary technologies for most online businesses. Even if you don’t need the immediately, you may want to add them in the future.

If you have any interest in using server side scripts, check what kind of server the host is using. If you plan to use Microsoft’s ASP technologies, you will need a Windows server. However, if you have no specific plans to use those, a Linux, Unix, OpenBSD, or other open source server will probably be more flexible for you. You will also want to check if Perl, CGI, PHP, SSI and others can be used on the server. Most likely, if you plan to implement these technologies, you or somebody on staff should know what to look for. If your site is a straight forward website with nothing very fancy, don’t worry about it.

Customer Support

For casual sites like personal and hobby ones, customer support isn’t a big factor, though it is nice to have somebody there to guide you through anything. But for commercial websites, perhaps one of the most important factors in choosing a paid host is the service. Most hosts have email support, but keep an eye out for hosts that have phone numbers listed. These are obviously more valuable. Though some hosts have excellent turn around on email service requests, there’s no substitute for actually being able to talk to somebody if you need to. Also, be certain that the service is available 24/7, even on holidays. There’s no telling when your site may run into trouble and you need somebody to look into it.

You can do a bit to research the speed and quality of customer service. First, if you have the email and phone number available, use them. Send them an email with a small inquiry to see how fast you get a response and how well they answered your question. Also, call the phone number to see if you connect to a person or a machine, and see how long you have to hold. However, one of the best ways to judge the service is through customer reviews.

Also remember that customer support goes hand in hand with price. The less you pay, the less can go toward keeping somebody skilled in server support available to help you.

Price

The cost of web service can vary from free to more than fifty dollars a month, depending on the company and the services. Don’t let price be the primary factor in your decision unless you are launching a personal page. For ecommerce, businesses and organizations, the quality of the service is more important.

Keep in mind that the most expensive plan is not necessarily the best, and the biggest name company may not be the right match for you. Established web hosters are naturally more expensive than smaller companies with similar service. You can get good hosting for a lower price, but it come with a risk that the host isn’t as good as you planned or they may go out of business.

Also, be aware of resellers. Resellers buy space from a larger company and do not host their own sites. Their services can be much cheaper than even the companies they lease space from, but there are potential drawbacks. If you make a customer service request, it must be routed through them to the actual host, making the requests take longer. Resellers can be good companies, but make sure you look into them and those who they are buying space from.

If your website is important, beware of cheap plans, free plans, and some reseller plans. Your website may end up on a server with a lot of other sites. How fast your site responds will be influenced by the traffic on the other sites hosted with yours. You can ask your hosting company what other sites are being hosted with yours.

Before You Commit

Before dealing with a host, you will want to find user opinions on them. Keep in mind, no host can please everybody all of the time. Some people have very high expectation and become irate if issues are not fixed immediately. On the other hand, you may notice recurring problems with particular companies, or you may notice there are more complaints than praise. Take note of this.

One resource for finding user opinions and inquiring about hosts, as well as finding hosts, is our own web hosting related forums (forums.devshed.com). On that site, you will see several forums related to web hosting midway down.

Only caution you may use: hosts often have reduced prices for plans if you sign up for a year. If you are uncertain of the host, you may want to stick to monthly or quarterly terms until you trust them.