How to choose the best web host for your needs

Choosing a good web hosting provider is very important. With a good web hosting company you won’t have many problems like with a poor hosting company which will bring you much pain. Here are a few guidelines for you to consider when you’re looking for a web hosting for your web site services:

Reliability and speed of access
Your web host should be reliable and fast, and it should guarantee its uptime. Look for a minimum uptime 99.5% or higher.

Traffic/Bandwidth
Traffic or bandwidth is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site. Don’t believe any commercial web hosting company that advertises “unlimited bandwidth”. The host company has to pay for the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, they will not silently bear your costs and in the end you will receive an exorbitant bill for having “exceeded” the “unlimited bandwidth”.

Most new web sites start with 3 – 5 GB of bandwidth per month. When your traffic requirements will grow over time, you will need higher bandwidth so it will be wise to check their policy for overages.

Disk space
Most sites need less than 15 MB of web space, unless you upload lots of movie files or high resolution of images. Don’t temp when host provider gives you 200 MB or 500 MB, be aware that you are unlikely to use that space. It doesn’t need to be your primary factor when you consider the web hosting packages.

Technical support
Don’t accept a host which does not have staff working on weekends or public holidays. You need to find host provider that have technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Check out how long they take to respond. Check to see if they are technically competent. You wouldn’t want to sign up for a host that is run by a bunch of salesmen who only know how to sell and not fix problems.

FTP, PHP, Perl CGI-BIN access, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH
If you are paying for a site, you really should make sure you have all of these. Note that some commercial hosts do not allow you to install PHP or CGI scripts without their approval. This is not desirable since it means that you have to wait for them before you can implement a feature on your siteSSL (secure server), MySQL, Shopping Cart.

Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding
If you have your own site, you would probably want to have email addresses at your own domain. Look for host that provides this with the package.

Control Panel
Control panel allows you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. It should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your accounts. Look for web hosting provider that will give you access to the control panel.

Server
In general, if you want to use things like ASP, you have no choice but to look for a Windows NT/2000/XP machine for your server. Otherwise sign up for accounts using the often cheaper, more stable and feature-laden Unix systems running the Apache server.

Posted in March 9th, 2008 by Busyboo |