Web Hosting Guide

Depending on what your website is for, choosing a web host can be the most crucial part of the ‘getting online to the world wide web (WWW)’ process. One reason for this can be because that there is too many web host out there to choose from and so much web hosting features to consider. This web hosting guide will try to solve some of your web hosting problems and help you choose the perfect web host for your website.

What exactly is web hosting?

Choosing a reliable web host is important because this is where your website is housed. Basically your web host is a computer that is connected to the internet 24 hours a day and this is where you ‘plug’ your website into.

Can you imagine what it will be like going to Coles or Safeway to do your shopping only to find out it closes every two or so hours? That’s the effect a bad web host can do for your online business.

There are four main ways of hosting a website: shared hosting, dedicated hosting, co-location or you can do it yourself. The cheapest way for new webmasters will be to use the share web hosting option.

Choosing a web host

When you choose your web hosting requirements, you must decide whether you want a paid or free web host. Free web hosting such as Geocities, Tripod, or other free hosts will provide you with your basic of needs, however you should never choose a free host for important web sites such as your online business.

Although free, these host will often ask you to incorporate their banner and popup advertisements making your website look unprofessional and can frustrate for your visitors.

Paid web hosting on the other hand will often provide more web space for your website, access to server-side languages (PHP, ASP, Coldfusion) and also advance features such as databases, SSL Servers, anonoumous FTP, regular backups, Uptime guarantee, raw logs, and statistics.

Unix/Linux or Windows web hosting?

When choosing your web hosting you must decide whether it will be hosted on a Windows or Unix/Linux platform. This choice can depend on what language you are comfortable with, for example if you already use Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Active Server Pages (ASP), VBScript, Visual Interdev, SQL server or if you are a Microsoft person like me J, then choosing a Windows based host would be the ideal solution.

The advantages of Unix/Linux web hosting are that it is often cheaper than Windows hosts. Unix/Linux web host are the most common amongst web hosting companies and is often more reliable and stable than Windows hosts.

Features to look for in your web hosting plan

By far the most important feature to look for when searching for web hosting is the customer service/support. Should your host ever go down or if you are having difficulties setting something up then there should be someone there that you can speak to, either through email or phone. The response time must be quick!

Setup fee
This is a once off fee to setup your web hosting account. Some host will waive this fee if you pay up front for a year, you should always ask.

Transfer Rate
This is the bandwidth your website can use on a monthly basis. If you website attracts little traffic then 1GIG should suffice. However, it may be hard to know how much you require, so make sure you know whether the web hosting plan that you are on is upgradeable, also what are the fees involved to upgrade? A good host will only charge you the difference between your current web hosting plan with the new plan that you require.

Disk space
Disk space is the amount of space on the host machine that is allocated to you. This is easier to decide compared to transfer rate. Basically the space you require is the combinations of all file size your web pages, images and any document take up. For a small web site a web hosting plan with about 10MB should suffice. However, like the transfer rate you should always find out how much it cost to purchase extra disk space. This is usually sold in blocks, eg $10.00 for extra 50MB

FrontPage Extensions
Do you use Microsoft FrontPage? Some features in FrontPage depends on extensions require from your web host. If you require this then you will need to choose a web hosting plan that provides FrontPage extension support. Some hosts are undoubtedly more enthusiastic than others in their provision of extensions support. With the best you will have no problems, with the less than expert you will find that extensions fail or become corrupted regularly and that help may be less than forthcoming.

Web hosting statistics
If you run an online business it is very important that you have some sort of statistics. Statistics are important because this information is usually useful when attempting to get advertising or reassessing your promotional efforts.

A good statistics program can help you uncover:

· Referrers
· IP Addresses and User Agents
· Demographics
· Search Engine Statistics
· Visitor Behavior
· Traffic Patterns Over Time