Evaluating Web Hosts
Choosing a web host is like choosing a long distance carrier: at best it involves some guesswork, at worst you switch carriers like opponents at a round robin tennis tournament. Hopefully this analysis will help to narrow and clarify your selection criteria.
Reliability
Most web hosts advertise an uptime guarantee. If you take the time to look, you’ll find that almost all web hosts’ computers use the same software, connect to the Internet through the same telecommunications carriers and are stored in a secure data center. These can vary in quality, but generally do not differentiate providers.
Reliability is predominantly a matter of discipline and proper controls. The senior management team is responsible for both factors in an organization, if not directly then indirectly by hiring the people who are. A guarantee is only as good as the company providing it. What feeling do you get from the company?
Price
Does the price reflect the company’s costs? For a web host, costs include computers, Internet connections, support staff and facilities. Computer prices have been driven straight down over the years, thanks to the relentlessly competitive spirit of Michael Dell and company. The price of Internet connections is also at a historical low, and will only keep going down. By the time the Telecommunications bubble burst around 2001, there had been so much bandwidth installed, that today, only about 40% of it is in use. Excess capacity drives prices down. Are these savings being passed on to you, the customer?
Where is the hosts support staff located? The generally accepted number is that providing support offshore saves 60%. This results in a significant savings that can be passed on to customers. For all the negative press on outsourcing, India for example, has only had 1 million jobs from foreign companies outsourced to it, where as America has had 6 million jobs outsourced to it from foreign companies. Outsourcing works both ways.
Features
If you are currently using, or have your heart set on, a particular set of technologies, it is as simple as whether or not a Web host supports them. If you do not, we suggest you choose the simplest technologies that will get the job done. Many features can end up as toys rather tools. The use of one technology may offer additional features over another, but is additional functionality the most efficient deployment your resources? Complexity costs money.
Service
Wal-Mart resells products. Products are tangible, and can be physically inspected. Web hosts sell services. The quality of a service is only as good as the people providing it. It is certainly more difficult to evaluate a purchase that cannot be thoroughly inspected before hand. You can however look at whose selling – that can be thoroughly inspected – the management team, values statement, privacy policy, conduct statement and contracts. What do they convey?
If you don’t know web hosting, know the web host.(sm)
Host1 has provided website hosting, design & marketing services for small business since 1993.
Web Hosting Bandwidth Explained
When shopping for web hosting, a very common concern, and legitimate one, is the amount of bandwidth you will need. When you are buying insufficient bandwidth, you might find yourself in two undesired situations: paying, usually high fees, for the extra bandwidth your web site needed or having your web site shut off. Overbuying bandwidth is not a good thing either as it will put you in the position to pay for something you don’t use. This article is intended to help you determine just how much of bandwidth your web site requires.
What is bandwidth anyway?
Let’s just see what bandwidth is. Bandwidth is the term that is used to denote the amount of data that has been transferred from your web space to the computers of your visitors. To put it simple, bandwidth is the amount of data that flows across a network wire in a given period of time. In web hosting industry this time period usually is one month. This happens simply because web hosting providers are also charged monthly for their huge broadband Internet connection. This is the cost that ultimately is then passed on to the consumer in the form price for their individual web hosting plan.
Bandwidth being such a delicate matter for a successful web presence, could you at least estimate the bandwidth needs of your web site? The answer is yes, you can estimate it, but you can never be sure of your estimate being perfectly correct because of all the variables involved.
How do I calculate my bandwidth?
If your index page has a size of let’s say 50 KB, every time you get a visitor on your start page (assuming that your visitors will only open you first page and not browse your entire web site), your visitor will download 50 KB of information onto his or hers computer. For 100 visitors, you will get a total of 5.000 KB of data being transferred from the web server hosting your site to your visitor’s computers.
So a formula for computing your estimated needs of bandwidth would look like this:
Size of your web content * number of visitors that accessed that web page = your consumed bandwidth
The formula looks very simple, yet estimating correctly the bandwidth required by your web site is anything but simple. This is obvious when you look at what makes up this formula.
The size of one web page is one thing, and the total size of your web site is another. You should take into consideration the total size of your web site and this means including files offered for download. Also web sites grow in time or even change completely. When this happens, you must redo the estimates for your web site bandwidth.
When it comes to visitors browsing your web site, it is rather difficult to predict what pages your visitors will access. For example, some visitors would stop at the index page, other will look for the contact details, and some will download your brochure. Knowing the sheer number of visitors your site has over one month can be very helpful in estimating the bandwidth required to support them.
Ultimately, when trying to find out the amount of bandwidth your web site requires you must answer two important questions:
· What is the size of your web site?
· What is the traffic your web site will get?
For a not very large web site that is not very that doesn’t offer audio/video downloads and doesn’t get very much traffic, you don’t need a very large amount of bandwidth. Average web sites use only about 500 MB of monthly bandwidth. But for small web sites that generate a lot of traffic, you should consider a web hosting plan that offers a lot of bandwidth.
For your reference, an average web site (for example a personal or a family web site) will also get average traffic, meaning a range of 50-500 visitors per day.
When assessing the requirements of your web site bandwidth, you must also understand that although you have purchased your web hosting together with the bandwidth as “per month”, your total monthly bandwidth is usually broken down into daily rates. Exceeding the daily rates might result in having your web site shut down for the day.
How to keep your bandwidth down?
Having a lot of rich web content (images, flash files, audio files) is a good way to make your web site more attractive for your visitors, but also is the shortest way to burn out your bandwidth. This article won’t tell you to give up using such files for your web site, instead simply point out that overcrowding your web pages with images could harm not only your bandwidth, but also the usability of your web site. Good web site design is not proportional with the number of images per page.
Offering downloads on your web such as site music files, .PDF files, flash or video files is another thing that will almost sure consume your bandwidth by just a handful of visitors. The simple download of an average .PDF file half of megabyte in size will consume monthly 1 GB of bandwidth, only with 2.000 people downloading it.
Stick to your goals and adjust your web site’s content strictly to fulfill them.
Keeping down the amount of bandwidth your web site is consuming might be easy to achieve with good preparation and excellent web design.
To avoid sky-high bandwidth costs, try to apply the following suggestions:
1) Make the file size of your web pages as small as possible. Lots of tools, some of them freeware can help you to do just that by compressing them.
2) Keep the images on your web site to a minimum. For the images included in your web site, use .JPG or .GIF compression tools to reduce the size and still keep the quality at an acceptable level.
3) Try not to offer too many downloadable files. If your have to offer downloadable files, it is best to only include the ones around 1 MB in size.
The right way the to start when planning your web site’s bandwidth needs, apart from the traffic your site will get, is to look at the type your content your are going to serve to your visitors. If your web site is packed with multimedia (video, music, flash etc) or if your offer .PDF files for download, you might consider opting for a dedicated server. Even in the event your web site is just starting out an you have limited funding for its hosting, it would be wise to choose a web hosting provider that will offer you a plan with more resources than your estimate need at a reasonable price.
As no matter how good your estimate is, there is a chance that it will fail, don’t forget to look at the charges for the bandwidth exceeding your monthly plan.
Calin Indre is editor at HostPinPin (www.hostpinpin.com ), a Cheap Web Hosting Directory Resource.
HostPinPin.com is a resource for webmasters and consumers looking to find a web hosting company. Providing web hosting articles, tips, web hosting reviews, compare web hosting plans and more.
This article may be reprinted or published without the authors consent as long as the “About” and “weblinks” are kept intact.
Dedicated Web Hosting Explained
Why is dedicated hosting such a big hit on the business web hosting market? If you look at the costs it involves, usually ranging from $150 – $1000 per month, another question comes into your mind: Does it even worth it?
When you have one single web server is rented to a single customer by the web hosting provider, you have dedicated web hosting. There are two similar solutions quite common too in the web hosting industry: virtual dedicated servers and co-location web hosting.
To make it easier to grasp the concepts, a virtual dedicated server shares the resources of a web server computer with other customers of the web hosting provider. You don’t get an entire computer just for you in virtual dedicated server hosting plans.
Co-locating web hosting also shares some similarities with dedicated web hosting. The main difference is that while in dedicated web hosting the web server computer belongs to the web-hosting provider and is only rented by the customer, in co-locating web hosting the customer owns the web server computer. The web-hosting provider only houses the web server computer and sells bandwidth to the customer.
Real dedicated web hosting a single web server is rented to a single customer.
Dedicated web hosting is the ideal solution for businesses that work with high traffic. The functionalities of your web site as well as the application required for its operation will fall under your precise control.
But with dedicated web hosting there are even more advantages.
Your hosting provider handles all concerns regarding the maintenance, the security, and the reliability of your web server. As your rent the computer, not purchasing it you don’t have to bother yourself with maintaining the hardware and the connectivity of the computer. This frees you from replacing the component or solving the problem, as all these fall into the provider’s responsibility. Many web hosting providers will even offer you compensations as part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Usually, in the event of such failure you will be reimbursed with the cost of your hosting plan for a month or a fraction of it, depending of the severity of the failure. Looks quite good compared to having to pay for the component and for the technical support required for actually replacing the component, all this while your web site in not online. At the end of the day you will only pay for functional hardware.
Think what your business could do with all the resources you have just saved on the above maintenance issues.
As the costs of administering and maintaining the web server you have rented vary depending on your web hosting provider, you can choose between “managed” or “unmanaged” service levels.
Should you feel uncomfortable with the technical expertise required by the management of a web server computer, you could opt for “managed” dedicated hosting. This means that you will have available a “control panel”. The control panel allows you to perform all the essential tasks required by the proper functioning of your web server via a simply point-and-click user-friendly interface. This way you won’t need to know or type any command lines, or poses no in depth knowledge of the operating system, while still being able to setup, administer and maintain all the web sites on your web server.
The “unmanaged” option is recommended only for those with great degree of technical expertise in mastering a web server as it provides root access to the server. This in turn, offers complete server administration, thus the possibility to configure every service on your web server. Of course, not having the necessary services are configured properly, may result in serious system failure. These are the reasons that make unmanaged dedicated hosting only recommendable for people with solid server administration background or for web developers that need custom applications for their web sites, or a customized environment.
Having a dedicated server means that the stability of the computer will not be prone to the plagues affecting shared web hosting solutions. Just think at overload, server being crowded with applications and components required by the other customers, or even errors in programming usually made by the beginners. Add to that the fact that on a shared web server the processor time and the installed memory is shared with the software applications needed by the other users.
Managed or unmanaged, dedicated web hosting makes it easier for you to provide instant support to your own customers when it is required. This would not be possible on a shared hosting plan or you will be faced with delays and possible additional technical support fees. Needless to say a prompt support service on your side also means happy customers and business growth.
For those running a business in web design for example, the advantages of having their own dedicated web server are invaluable. This is true not because his studio will be able to offer pure hosting services, but because he will able to offer them packaged with the web design activity. Modifying a web site for a customer or uploading a new one is a matter of minutes when you have around-the-clock access to your web server. Another advantage comes from the fact that once a complete web presence solution, design and hosting, is offered by the studio to a customer, there is a higher chance for having that customer become a regular.
The benefits of a good dedicated web hosting solution for businesses translate into sales growth, better customer relationship, improved company image, reduced cost compared with in-house web hosting solution, and the list could go on. A dedicated web server means that you can run a better business and better business reads profit.
Calin Indre is editor at HostPinPin (www.hostpinpin.com ), a Cheap Web Hosting Directory Resource.
HostPinPin.com is a resource for webmasters and consumers looking to find a web hosting company. Providing web hosting articles, tips, web hosting reviews, compare web hosting plans and more.
This article may be reprinted or published without the authors consent as long as the “About” and “weblinks” are kept intact.
Effectiveness of Web Hosting Directories
John is very happy today, for the first time in his life he has created his very own website. Now he is looking for a web host so that he can put his identity on the net. Casually he asks his friend Mac about it. Mac tells him that web-hosting directories are the best place to look for a web host. Getting curious John then asks Mac what exactly a Web Hosting Directory is. Mac responds that web hosting directories are a web hosting marketplace where prospective hosts list their products, plans, prices and other important information so that according to their requirements, customers can choose a suitable plan. Along with the details, it also contains web hosts’ rankings. John is now extremely happy as his dream is finally going to come to fruition. Like John, there are many beginners who are in search of a reliable web host and come across web hosting directories. Here a new question arises: Are these web hosting directories really trustworthy sources for novices like John? To find an answer it’s very important to understand the working of WHDs.
Basically web-hosting directories are of two types: paid WHDs and free WHDs. For paid directories, either web hosts pay a set amount for placing their banners on the site, or they pay commission if they get customers via that medium. On the other hand, free WHDs like www.askwebhosting.com and www.hostbyte.com etc. web hosts list their services without paying any fees.
Some people believe that paid WHDs are very easy to manipulate as the ranking of web hosts can be changed in unfair ways. Others have the view that WHDs that are actually free reflect the true ranking of web hosts companies. Whatever the case may be, paid or free, people should believe the web hosts rankings only if they are based completely on votes of customers who have actually given their remarks and have left their website address as well.
It is not possible for any web hosting company to have 100% positive reviews. It is also observed that at times customers who are satisfied with their web host forget to express their opinion about that host. However, a biased customer who is not satisfied with their web host does not forget to mention their opinion of that web host. This implies that a negative review doesn’t always reflect the true picture of a web host company.
No doubt web hosting directories are very useful if the newbie like John wants to compare prices and features of different companies. But, when it comes to choosing a web host he/she should make an intelligent choice by referring to other resource sites (forums etc.) as well.
By Priyanka Agarwal,
M6.Net Internet Promoter
Leaders in Web Hosting, M6.net is a strong company that has pioneered in the web hosting industry since 1997. The company started with nothing but a few web sites and less clients; and is now hosting over ten thousand web sites across more than one hundred countries around the world. For reliable web hosting M6.net offers the best value, starting from $4 m/o with 500 MB space, 20GB bandwidth, a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee and 24 hour support.
Ecommerce Web Hosting Considerations
Website hosting can be a complex undertaking. Determining how much space you need, how much transfer, finding a reliable host, and getting everything online is no simple task. Add ecommerce to the mix and things become even more complex. This article will deal with some of those additional complications to finding a host for an online store. All of the same considerations to finding general hosting can be applied to ecommerce hosting, there are simply a few additional ones that need some attention.
Basics- Disk Space and Transfer
The core states of any kind of hosting, ecommerce or not, remain space and transfer, or traffic. Generally measured in monthly increments, your space and transfer will place a crucial role in determining just what size plan you need. Ecommerce sites will, generally speaking, require more space and transfer than an equivilant sized site without ecommerce. This is due to the presence of the shopping cart upon which the online storefront is based. Shopping cart programs are installed to the account on which they operate, requiring space, and their scripts for running the store will require additional transfer to handle customers as they browse, add items to their cart, and check out. Will there be a tremendous amount of extra transfer required by the cart? That depends on how many use the cart and on the cart itself. This is why its best to start small and having a clear upgrade path to handle future popularity.
Prospective online merchants will generally have a good idea how many products they’ll be selling initially. This will vary wildly from merchant to merchant, and many merchants don’t put their entire stocks online. It is wise to start with a considered selection of products first, especially if you wish to initially keep your hosting plan small and upgrade as the store prospers. Those with a great deal of products need to be aware they will probably be facing a bigger monthly fee for a larger hosting plan. Once the decision is made regarding the products, attention can be turned to finding a suitable shopping cart program to contain them.
Shopping Cart
The choice of shopping cart can be a personal one. Those entirely new to ecommerce will probably not have any experience with any kind of shopping cart software. There are a number of popular choices, and most hosting companies will provide one, if not a variety, from which you can choose. It is important to find a shopping cart that suits the individual user, as attempting to change your shopping down the road can be a long process that will, most likely, bring your store down during a transitional period. Don’t immediately jump at the first cart a host offers. Ask if they have demos and try them out. Be sure it’s a program you can learn and use, as it is the primary way you’ll be doing your online business. Even if you have a large business and have a design firm setting up the cart, a rudimentary knowledge of the cart’s processes is highly recommended.
Learn as much about your prospective shopping cart software as possible. Make sure it supports SSL, a common site security protocol that will help keep your customer’s credit card numbers safe when ordering online. It will need to support your merchant account and payment gateway. In many cases a host might bundle these services, so compatibility isn’t an issue. If you secured your merchant services separately from hosting, be sure they are compatible. Find out if the cart has a recommended maximum product limit and, of course, try not to exceed it. The store may slow down and perform poorly if there are too many products in it.
Finally, make sure it will do everything you want it to do. Some merchants sell services and downloadable items that don’t conform exactly to the order-product-ship-product flow. If your cart doesn’t support these features by default, there may be 3rd party add-ons that will provide this functionality. Miva Merchant is one such shopping cart with a very active 3rd party developer community providing a wide range of add-ons, or “modules” to extend the feature set of the original program. The merchant will have to buy these add-ons and have them installed on their own initiative, though, and the hosting company will not be able to support them.
Reliability and Support
Perhaps of greatest importance is reliability in your chosen host. Think in terms of a “brick and mortar” storefront. If someone locks the front door during business hours, then no customers can come in and nothing is sold. Similarly, if an online store is down at any hour, no customers can come in and nothing is sold. You want the most reliable hosting for such a mission-critical site. Never just take the word of a hosting company’s site in regards to their uptime. Do research and look for customer reviews of your prospective host. Online merchants should always be willing to pay more for a reliable hosting company with good uptime and support. A good rule of thumb is to stay away from free or “bargain basement” hosts, since support and uptime are usually the first things to suffer with this kind of hosting.
Conclusions
Finding the right ecommerce hosting company requires a few additional considerations. Decide on your products, your shopping cart, and then shop for your hosting company. You will need more space and transfer than an equivalent site, but start small with your product selection and you can still save money on your hosting. Find a shopping cart that’s easy for you to use and understand, as switching at a later date can result in downtime and a lot of work transferring your products. Finally, make sure your host has solid uptime, as an online store that’s down isn’t generating any sales.
About the Author
Mr. Lester has served for 4 years as the webmaster for http://www.apollohosting.com and previously worked in the IT industry an additional 5 years, acquiring knowledge of hosting, design, and search engine optimization. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers.