Choosing your Hosting Service
So you've designed your website! The next step is to choose a Web hosting service provider. To do this, you need to find a Web hosting company to host your website. In this article I'll help you choose a hosting service that you need.
Amongst the mushrooming of web hosting companies that are coming up every day it’s really difficult to choose the perfect home for your website. In other words how to chose the web hosting service that’s best for you. We shall discuss what you need to look out for and what not. What weightage to put on which feature. Suppose you are planning to put up a content based website which will not have any videos o maybe only a few videos. Then the feature of unlimited storage or hosting infinite domains come secondary to you. In fact you do not need those features at all. But uptime is of utmost importance. Imagine a situation when google bot comes to crawl your website and doesn’t find it… It puts you in a list of non existent domain and maybe will not come back to your site for months together! What happens to your revenue? You are at a loss! So read on and find out how to choose the best hosting service for yourself.
Decide on your budget?
Even here there are lots of options. You can choose from ad-supported free hosting to managed dedicated servers which cost hundreds of dollars per month. But taking your pick is what requires judgment.
While deciding your cost factor you have to keep that following things in mind:
How are you going to monetize your website?
Will you be building an online shopping mall with shopping carts and merchant gateways or are you going to earn by subscription services, advertising, and affiliate programs. If you are planning to build an online store then a simple hosting service will not suffice. Your website hosting service provider has to have database support and support scripting languages. Also downtime will be critical as there will be online transaction processing.
Downtime
Downtime is critical to any website. So if a web hosting service promises a greater uptime in lieu of a few dollars then I would say it’s worth it. Even 0.5% greater uptime counts. It boils down to many hours of service.
Picture this :
There are 365days in a year and each day has 24 hours and each hour has 60 minutes.
So the total number of minutes in a year are :
365 x 24 x 60 = 525600minutes.
So 0.5% of that is 2628 minutes which is 43.8 hours.
So its approximately 3.65 hours per month.
Its highly probable that google bot or any other search engine spider for that matter will crawl your website during those three hours and find it unavailable. Imagine the loss you incur if you earn through content! Your site may go down many places in the listing. So bottom line is its worth paying for a web hosting service that offers maximum uptime than going for any cheap web hosting service.
Options to choose from
There are various options available on the internet. Now how to choose between a free web hosting service provider to the moderate or a pricey one? This is a big question. You have to weigh your pros and cons before taking this very vital decision.
So here we ponder on every available option based on the sequence of pricing.
FREE web space
The greatest secret of life is : There is nothing called a FREE LUNCH in this world! You have to pay for everything you are getting. Either directly or indirectly. The problems with free server space are as follows:
- Small disc space
- No server side scripting
- Very small monthly bandwidth transfer allowance
- No database support
- Lots of banner ads
- No guarantee for uptime
- You never know when your website will be taken down
So if you are hosting a personal website to share some thoughts with friends and relatives then its perfectly alright. But here you are trying to make some serious money through your website. So I strongly recommend you to buy your own domain and webserver space with a respectable and reputed web hosting service provider.
Shared hosting
Shared hosting is sometimes synonymously used to define virtual hosting. This is usually the most cost effective yet reliable hosting service available on the internet. The scenario is that you are given a shared server space with lots of other websites that might be residing on that same server. This type of services have fairly good uptime and you also don’t need to bother about tweaking with the server or servicing it. Its taken care of by the hosting service provider.
Virtual Private Server
Virtual private server is somewhere in between a shared hosting and dedicated hosting in terms of price and power. A physical server is virtually divided or split between two or more websites by using special kind of softwares specially made for this purpose. The user feels that he is using his own server with full control and desktop access. That is the beauty of the system. The only catch lies in the fact that you can not use the full CPU power or the full memory of the physical server. This power is divided amongst all the users of the virtual server. This process is also called virtualization. In this way one can get all the benefits of a dedicated server at much lower cost. The full credit goes to the virtualization softwares.
This also lets the client to gain full access to ‘his part’ if the server. He is also responsible for managing the server and installing security updates to keep the server hale and hearty and keep it running smoothly. So unless you know server administration skills this kind of hosting plan is not recommended for you.
Some hosts provide the facility of managed virtual hosting service. So if you are not sure about your server administration skills then its best to go for such service even if they charge you a bit more.
Dedicated Server
A dedicated server is pretty much like owning your own server with your own high speed internet link. You have access and control of the whole physical server. You can use it’s full CPU power and memory. Also you do not run any security threat risk as no other software or website is running on your server. So you can be sure about its security.
Now the question comes that who should use dedicated server? The answer is very simple. If you want to run very CPU and memory intensive scripts or if your website draws a very high number of visitors then you should go for dedicated hosting plans.
Like a virtual unmanaged server here also you are responsible for the health of the server. You have to troubleshoot problems yourself and load security updates and patches yourself. So once again you need server admin skills or you have to pick them up if you don’t have any. But what is the alternative if you don’t want to take the pain of housekeeping yet want to enjoy a dedicated server? The answer is managed dedicated server.
Managed Dedicated Server
Like a virtual server a managed dedicated server is also rented by you but the difference is that it has a nanny to take care of it. The nanny is no one other than the company you are renting it from. It functions as the system admin and is responsible to keep the server up and running at all times. If at all the server goes down you can generate a service ticket with appropriate level of priority and your problem will be looked into by experienced server administrators. All the updates including security updates and antivirus updates are installed by them. So you can be free from all the housekeeping troubles.
Managed dedicated servers are often more costly than normal dedicated server for the obvious reason that you are also paying for the managing cost on top of the server cost but it is advisable if you are running a high traffic mission critical website whose uptime is crucial for your business.
Do you have a domain name?
Having a domain name is very important for your business. It is actually the face of your business or if you are building an online business then the domain name is your brand itself. While choosing a domain name you have to keep Search Engine Optimization in mind and have to choose the name accordingly. It is always better to include the keywords, that you target to gain traffic from, to be present in your URL. It gives you higher ranking in search engines. Like I am trying to optimize on the keywords ‘freelancing on the internet’ so I have chosen the sitename as www.freelancing-on-net.com So I advice you to do the same.
Next question is from where to purchase a domain name. There are plenty of hosting service providers that sale domain names too. But my personal web hosting service provider is
Hostmonster.com
They give very good deals of unlimited disk space, hosting unlimited domains and unlimited traffic or bandwidth usage per month.
Booking a domain or hosting a domain means pointing your domain to a DNS (Domain Name Server) which inturn points to the server which hosts your website so that visitors can land up to your website.
What hosting features to look for?
After you have decided on the type of hosting you need and have finalized on a domain name, comes the task of selecting what features you need on your server from your hosting service provider.
Now if you have chosen shared hosting plan then the features depend on what plan you have chosen. If you have chosen dedicated hosting then most hosting service provider will let you choose the features you need and cut your coat accordingly. You can pick and choose parameters like processor power, memory, hard disk capacity etc.
Disk space
How much disk space you require depends on how big your website is. If you are building a movie download website or a music download website then you are going to need a lot of hard drive space. Also web hosting companies take into account the space used by your database if you are using one. So its better to keep some room for your database too after making an intelligent estimate as to how much space it can use. Best option would be to go for unlimited plans which are not very cheap and is provided by most good hosting service providers like HOSTMONSTER.COM
Transfer Allowance
Most hosting service providers allow transfers of upto a limit like 1000MB per month or so. So if your site is a free software download site or a movie or music download website with high traffic then its not advisable to go for a hosting plan that has bandwidth transfer limit. When the limit is capped out, your site will stop functioning and visitors will not be able to view your website. This is also disastrous for search engine rankings. If a search engine does not find your website while crawling it then it will surely go down in ranking. So to be on the safe side its always better to choose an unlimited transfer allowance plan. Such facilities are now also available from shared hosting providers at very cheap costs. To know more visit HOSTMONSTER.COM
FTP Transfers
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is necessary while you try to upload your website files onto the server that is hosting your website. Nearly all hosting service providers now give you this feature and their servers are compatible with most popular FTP clients. But its still better to check if this feature is present before finally committing for a hosting service provider.
Email IDs
Most hosting service providers now allow POP or IMAP mailing using your domain name. It gives a professional look and feel to your business. Email IDs typically look like admin@freelancing-on-net.com You will have to find out how many such email IDs you need against how much your hosting service provider is giving you. You shall have to take a plan accordingly. It is also advisable to check if your hosting service provider is giving you free spam protection and installing a free antivirus to check your email attachments etc. Most good hosting service providers do provide such facilities for free.
Scripting
Server-side Scripts are nothing but programs that run in your web server. This is used for server side programming. Lot of scripts are used today in websites to add interactivity to your website and make it feature rich. A common script maybe a contact form or an email opt in form, tell-a-friend form, a bulletin board or a discussion forum. There are various scripting languages for writing these scripts. The most common are PHP, Perl and - on Windows servers - ASP and ASP.NET.
There are many scripting websites which let you download free scripts from. You can either use them or write your own scripts to run on your server. But that is immaterial here. The point is if your hosting service provider lets you run scripts or not. Now most of the hosts provide advanced scripting support. So you should check the plan you are buying before you actually pay for the plan and commit.
Database
Many Web scripts, such as discussion forums and open source blogging scripts, need a database to store their content. Common database systems include the open-source MySQL and PostgreSQL and, Microsoft's SQL Server if you're using a Windows hosting. If your hosting service supports scripting, it probably includes access to a database system as well.
If you are planning to host a number of websites then look for a hosting plan which offers many databases. Also now many hosts offer unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth packages at very reasonable costs. Pick one such plan. Usually you administer your databases - which includes creating and deleting databases and also viewing and editing data, by some sort of interface. A very common one being PhpMyAdmin.
Backups and Monitoring
All reputed web hosting service provider now takes periodic backups. You can chat with their customer support to find out how often they take backups and find out what is right for you. If you have a dedicated unmanaged server then you shall have to take your own backups. So its better to go for a managed dedicated server to save you the trouble. Its really worth the penny. Also its desirable to ask your web service provider as how they restore data and what is their turnaround time in case of any mishap. This is really important because a search engine spider like googlebot might visit your website during the downtime and move it down in ranking if it finds it unavailable.
Summary
So after you have considered all the points mentioned in this article you need to give them weightage according to your priorities. Then the web hosting service provider which gets the maximum number of points is to be picked up.links
