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Website Hosting 1
| 2 Tutorial
on Web Site Hosting: What to Look For
What is web site hosting, and why do you need it?
Simply put, a web host is a computer at which you park your website to
make it accessible on the internet. You put the web pages needed to run
your website on it. A web host might also provide you the tools to
create those web pages.
There is a lot of work and cost involved in making sure the web host is
always up, runnng, and safe (from viruses, trojans, hardware failure,
etc). The cheapest and easiest way is to buy website hosting from a web
host company that specialises in it. You pay the web host to host your
website and to take responsibility for making it always available on
the internet.
Note: the web site hosting company merely makes your website accessible
on the net. Similar to renting you business premises in the off-line
world. It does not drive traffic to your site for
you.
It is important to choose the best web host for your needs, reliable,
with good support. It is not easy to transfer to a new one once you've
built up your website, if the host you picked gives problems. It need
not cost too much. There is inexpensive quality website hosting to be
found.
What do you look for to find the best web
host for your site?
Reliability: A website
hosting company that won't disappear overnight. Does it have a good
track record?
Uptime: This is the time
(24/365) that your site is up and running on the internet. The best web
site hosts guarantee at least 99.5% to 99.9% uptime. This is not so
important if yours is a personal or hobby site, but if it is a
money-making site, it is absolutely critical. Downtime translates to
loss of income.
There's a neat web service that you can sign
up with free, from Hyperspin (right-click to
open in new window), that moniters your site hourly and
alerts you by email or SMS if it goes down.
Access Speed: A web host
that will load (show) your pages quickly. If your website takes too
long to load, people will leave without seeing it. For that reason, get
website hosting that gives high disk space and bandwidth limits (over
5GB), even if you don't use it all.
It's one way of knowing that the host is not
going to squeeze thousands of websites on one server, which overloads
the network, to offset whatever cheap rates they charge, like $1-$2 per
month.
Customer Support: Does it
provide competent and timely support 24 hours a day, all year round?
Things can go wrong at the most awkward times, and you want help when
it happens, not 2 days later. Not all website hosting that advertise
24/7 support actually provide it. So test them – email them
queries at unearthly hours, and on weekends. See how fast they take to
respond, the competency of their reply.
Below is a list of the features that web hosts provide. But if you just
want to go straight to see the recommended web hosts, go to Get
Web Host
What features do you need from your web host?
Disk Space: This is the
amount of hard disk space given to you for your web pages, graphics,
files, emails, and so on. A web page is typically less than 50KB unless
it has movies, or audio files, or lots of graphics, so 25MB is more
than enough for a start (1MB=1000KB). Most web hosts now give such high
quotas, like 300GB (300,000MB), that you'd likely never use anywhere
near the limit.
Bandwidth / Data Transfer:
Total bytes transmitted in showing your web pages to your visitors. The
more visitors you have, the more bandwidth you need, which is why it's
sometimes referred to as traffic. Most sites use less than 3GB
bandwidth per month.
Some cheap website hosting plans give a
limited bandwidth, and charge extra for any traffic that goes over that
limit each month. Check that you can upgrade as your traffic grows.
Subdomains: Lets you create
subdomains under your main domain. Appears as
subdomainname.maindomainname.ext, where ext is the extension. Free web
hosts may use this method to give free domain names, which are actually
subdomains of their main domain.
Domains: For business
websites, try to get your own main domain. Your traffic is tied to your
domain name, it's valuable, and you would want to be able to take it
with you if you move to another host. Some domain name web site hosting
plans include one free domain registration in their pricing. It should
still name you, not the web host, as the owner; but check to be sure.
Add-on Domains: Some web
hosts allow you to use your allotted disk space and bandwidth for more
than one domain/website (each with its own home page and content). If
you're thinking of having more than one website, this is a cost-saver.
Dedicated IP Hosting: In
most website hosting, many domains (websites) share the same IP address
(which is a series of numbers that look something like 168.195.3.104,
used by computers on the internet to communicate with each other; you
don't have to know more than that about it).
The concern with this is that search engines
might ban all websites sitting on the same IP address as a website that
engages in dubious search engine practices. Others argue that search
engines are able to ban just that rogue website alone, without having
to ban the entire IP address.
Some webmasters therefore advocate getting a
dedicated IP address, even if it costs more. But actually, due to the
finite number of such addresses, it is not feasible for each website to
have its own IP address, so search engines will likely take the latter
course.
Email & Autoresponder:
These days, even cheap website hosting plans provide you multiple email
accounts at your domain. You can name them yourself, ex.
admin@mydomain.com. Some allow you to set the account to autorespond
with your own pre-crafted message.
Many provide a catch-all email feature. This
forwards emails sent to non-existent accounts at your domain, to an
account you specify.
Control Panel: Sometimes
called Site Management or Admin Tools. This allows you to manage your
website yourself. At a minimum, it should allow you to add, update, and
delete your web pages, files, and email accounts, and to change
passwords. These are tasks you'll have to do regularly, and it's too
much of a hassle to wait for customer support to do it for you. (Apart
from the backups the host does, you should also keep an updated copy of
your webpages on your own computer so you can change hosts easily if
necessary.)
Website Statistics: You'll
want this so as to know how many visitors you get, where they come
from, which pages they view most often, and so on. Important for
analysing your traffic so that you can fine-tune your website for
better traffic results.
Shopping Cart, SSL (Secure Server
Layer): You only need this in ecommerce web site hosting,
such as if you plan to sell directly from your website, and collect
credit card information. You might also need database services, for
example, if you are building an online store and have a catalog or
inventory to maintain.
Editor: You need to use an
editor or site builder to create your web pages. Some web hosts provide
a free online editor. These are often quite primitive or painful to
use. You might want to use a separate site builder, especially later
when you need more functionalities.
Just ensure that your host allows you to
upload pages from external site builders, via FTP (File Transfer
Protocol), or some other method. Most of them make it easy for you to
upload web pages you create in popular external editors like
Dreamweaver or Frontpage.
Extras: Many hosts, even the
cheap website hosting companies, provide additional features. Whether
you need them depends on the nature of your site. Example: chat or
forum software if you want to set up a forum. Or content management, if
you want to invite contributions, articles from your visitors.
Website Hosting 
