Quality Web Hosting
This guide will instruct you on how to find quality web hosting. There are a number of different factors you'll want to consider when looking for quality web hosting.
Here's a breakdown of the most important features of a quality web hosting plan:
| Allotted bandwidth | This really depends on how much traffic you are going to get. It's a lot harder to get traffic if you are selling a product, so if that's you, you won't need much at all to begin with. On the other hand, if you offer lots of free content and/or you're going to have (a) bulletin board(s) and/or a popular blog (Web Log) you'll need more traffic. 10 gigabytes per month is probably more than enough for most sites starting out. However, you want to have an inexpensive upgrade path should your site suddenly get really popular. |
| Cost per megabyte if you go over allotted bandwidth | You don't want to get locked in for expensive bandwidth add-ons should your site start getting really popular. Make sure the web site hosting company you choose has good prices for buying bandwidth in bulk. It pays big time to shop around on this one - sooner rather than later. |
| Pre-installed software & scripts | Make sure the web site hosting you choose has a good collection of pre installed PHP scripts. Important scripts are things like: form emailers, ezine managers for your mailing list, autoresponder scripts, content management systems, shopping carts, web calendars, tell a friend scripts, and the like. Shop around and do some thorough planning on this one too. |
| Customer support options / response time | If you email the sales team, and they take a week to get back to you, move on. If there's no 800 number, forget it. |
| Setup Fee | Shop around and you'll probably find a few quality web hosting companies that don't require a setup fee. |
| Do they require a contract | Also, shop around and try not to get locked into being with one company outside of a month to month agreement. This way, if you don't like the service, it costs nothing to pack your bags and get out of Dodge. |
| Disk space | For most smaller sites, 100 megabytes of storage is plenty. However, like with bandwidth, make sure that it's cost effective to upgrade the disk space before you sign up. |
| SSH/Telnet access | If you or a programmer you've hired is going to be developing custom PHP or Perl scripts for your site, this is extremely useful. It also comes in handy if you are trying to debug php or cgi script installations that you're trying to install. SSH is MUCH preferred over Telnet, as telnet does not encrypt your password, sending it in plain text over the network. This means advanced net types can see it if they use packet sniffing software. |
| Cron Daemon support | I recommend quality web hosting with cron daemon support. This will let you automate certain tasks, such as batch emailing everyone on your email list. A lot of PHP and CGI scripts require cron to function properly. |
| POP Mailboxes Allotted | You don't need that many POP mailboxes unless you are a fairly large organization. I'd say 10 is fine for most small ventures. |
| Virtual Server Support (Host Multiple Domains) | This is a great feature that you should put some thought into when deciding what is and what isn't quality web hosting. You can save significant money by hosting 6-10 sites with unique domain names on one account. Big savings! |
| PHP Support | This is extremely important. PHP is much faster than Perl/CGI, and the majority of linux web applications these days are written in PHP. Don't get web site hosting that doesn't support PHP. Also, make sure they have a large list of PHP modules installed, so that php scripts you install on your server will work right. |
| Perl/CGI Support | This is somewhat important, if you find a cgi script you like that doesn't have a PHP counterpart. However, Perl/CGI (even though I love it esp. w/ mod_perl) is outdated and runs much slower than an equivalent PHP program. |
| mySQL Support | mySQL is the most popular open source database, required for most PHP and Perl applications. PostgreSQL is also very good, but not as widely used as mySQL. |
| Web Based Control Panel | I consider this a must to be considered quality web hosting. The ability to log in, edit passwords and user accounts, email settings, cron jobs, and your database server is pretty much essential to getting anything done on your site. I wouldn't recommend buying web site hosting that doesn't have a quality web based control panel. |
