7 Simple Steps For Choosing A Great Web Host
There are thousands of web hosts around today with thousands of plans to choose from making what was once a simple procedure seem like a daunting task for both newbie and pro alike.
Whether you’re looking for your first host or looking to move on to a better one there are 7 simple steps you must follow to succeed in choosing a great host.
1. Platform
The first and most crucial step in choosing a web host is determining the platform the web server should run, usually a choice between Unix/Linux and Windows.
Your choice is largely determined by your website and the technologies used to create it, generally a website created with Microsoft technologies (ASP, VB) will run on Windows servers while most other sites using open source technologies (PHP, Perl, Python etc) will run on Linux based systems.
2. Features
Once you’ve chosen your platform the next step is determining the features you’ll need from your web host. Take your time with this step as the feature lists of web hosts are getting longer and longer every day and while some plans may look similar on the surface, a good look at the feature lists may tell another story.
Only you can determine the specific features you’ll need, but some key things to keep an eye on are:
Disk Space
Bandwidth
Backups
Uptime
Money Back Guarantee
Domains Allowed
Databases (Number & type)
CGI, PHP, Perl, Python, SSI
Cron
Email accounts
The list goes on and on, just remember to take your time and make sure your new web host is going to provide you with everything you need.
3. Cost
Often this is the only thing people consider when choosing their first web host, funds are usually tight and on the surface most hosts look very similar. Sometimes you get lucky and choose a good host, but more often than not it turns out to be a horror story.
I can’t stress enough that choosing a web host based on price alone is asking for trouble, remember that the cost of your web hosting is more than just the monthly fee, think about the total cost of ownership. TCO includes lost sales due to downtime & slow speeds, downtime rebates, extra bandwidth charges, setup costs, extra feature costs, and your monthly fee.
Many hosts will require you to pay yearly to get the best price available though there are some that allow you to pay by the month and still get the best price, it’s really a matter of personal choice as to what payment method works best for you.
4. Customer Service
Customer service is another aspect that is often forgotten about until it is too late, something breaks and you need it fixed and those wonderfully handy sales people who were more than helpful in taking your money are now nowhere to be seen, all the while you’re losing out on sales every minute.
You shouldn’t settle for anything less than 24/7/365 service, your website needs to be running all the time so it’s no good if your hosting company doesn’t work during the holidays. Don’t take the web hosting companies word for it, they all claim 24/7 support but few back it up with consistent performance. Be sure to test them out at various times of the day and night via phone, email and live chat if they offer it.
5. Support
An extensive knowledge base or faq can be a real time saver as well as being an indication of the level of customer service support and expertise you can expect to receive. Spend some time browsing the support sections of the website and see for yourself the level of support provided.
Are questions in the knowledge base answered thoroughly? Are real solutions provided or are they just “cut and paste” replies?
6. Longevity
Do a whois on the web host’s domain name and find out the creation date, anything less than a year ago and the risk that they won’t be around next year increases. They could be a great host, but considering more then 95% of new hosts go out of business within a year that really isn’t something you should be taking a chance on.
7. Uptime
It’s a fact of life that a web host cannot be online 100% of the time, servers need to be rebooted for security and software updates and any web host that doesn’t get updated faces the increased risk of being successfully hacked.
99.9% uptime guarantees are pretty standard in the industry however a guarantee is only as good as how it is defined and the company behind it. Look for no less than a full months free hosting should they not meet their guarantee, a prorated refund based on the amount of downtime is virtually worthless. Say you pay $10 for a month of hosting and your site is down for 24 hours. They will refund you for one day of downtime which ends up being about 33 cents.
There you go, 7 simple steps for choosing a great web host. It’s not rocket science, just a little research and investigating that can save a lot of heartache in the future.
About The Author:
Kyle Tully is the Founder of Web Host Critique – http://www.webhostcritique.org
Game Server Hosting – Ping or Die
Game servers are usually developed in a form of a standard component that can be found in many games that have a multiplayer option. After this kind of business became popular, hosting companies immediately responded to the growing demand and started offering dedicated servers for online gaming to both those who want to make business and to those who are simply enthusiastic. Generally game server hosting caters to two main groups of online games – those available from the main server, and those that operate through a series of distributed ones.
Centralized servers are mostly often used to host games that require these servers to be able to host thousands of users playing at the same time. The main server stores all the necessary data about the game environment and the cyber world is there 24 hours 7 days a week. The game goes on no matter if the user is online or offline. To participate in the game, a player usually needs special client software that connects to the main server. One of the most popular game using the technology of centralized servers is the World of Warcraft.
Another model is the distributed servers technology. This one is usually utilized by enthusiasts and small businesses. In this model the software is distributed onto several dedicated game servers. As an example, real-time strategies are usually based on this technology. They need frequent updates of the game world that is executed through messaging between users and servers. There should be a master server in this chain to control messaging between the whole bunch of distributed servers. Low latency and fast ping time – that is what needed for this model to be successful and ensure the fast speed of messages reaching the server and coming back to the user. Users usually choose servers with the best ping rates and connect to them to play online. That is why game server hosting companies connect their servers to the fastest networks. Security, operating system and applications tweaking and thorough configuration are also very important.
Hosting providers usually supply their clients with game server hosting services that include the most technologically advanced servers and network connections, very often with the preinstalled software to start online gaming business immediately. The most popular games using the technology of distributed servers are: Doom 3, Medal of Honor, Halo, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Quake 3 etc.
Game server hosting providers are expected to significantly increase their revenue due to such rapid growth figures of online gaming. Many hosting companies have already build up a wide range of special game server hosting offers including even those for $30-40 a month. This is significantly cheaper than many low-performance dedicated servers.
Kevin Dark is an online marketer. Find out more about game server hosting.
What Is Web Hosting Uptime And What Does It Mean For You
When you begin to look for a company to host your website, other than the amount of space and bandwidth that is offered, a company will usually promote their web hosting uptime. Most web hosting companies offer an uptime guarantee to promote how well their service is.
Web hosting uptime is a measurement of the time a computer server has been running, the longer the web hosting uptime the better the service (usually). Uptime is important to not only web hosting companies, but to any person or company that has a website, because if a website is down it could hurt a personal company’s reputation as well as the reputation of the web hosting uptime guarantee. Web hosting companies strive for a 99.9% uptime, which means that there would be less then 2 minutes of downtime a day.
Factors that impact a web hosting uptime are sometime unavoidable, but many companies strive to prevent downtime. Downtime can be classified in three ways: planned downtime which is caused when a server is updated or upgraded, semi-planned downtime which is caused when software companies find a security breach and a patch must be put into place, and the worst is unplanned downtime which can be caused by an overloaded server, a software/hardware malfunction, or malicious software.
Uptime guarantees made by web hosting companies are based off of past information. Web hosting uptime can be monitored and maintained a few ways. There are services that provide 24/7 monitoring. Large web hosting companies have their own departments that monitor their servers. A loss in web hosting uptime can be prevented by having a redundant server to fall back on incase the primary server goes down. For a planned single server change this method may be practical for a larger company, but the costs implied for an additional server in a smaller company or providing this for multiple servers in larger companies can be impractical. Unplanned downtime would also keep this method from working well.
Some niceties that many websites provide is a friendly downtime message that will still allow the user know that the site is only temporarily down. Larger web hosting companies are able to provide a quicker return to normalcy to maintain their uptime guarantee, because they have staff readily available to respond to a downtime error quickly. Smaller companies may experience a longer downtime.
For consumers, researching web hosting uptime can prevent a package from being purchased from a web host that has a lot of downtime. There are websites that track a company’s web hosting uptime and provide reviews on the company freely for review. Other places to look for information are on forums either provided by the web hosting company or on web hosting review forums.
If your website does experience downtime you can contact the technical support or customer service department to see when your site will be restored. Understand that no web hosting company can have a 100% uptime guarantee. If your website experiences too much downtime switching to a different company with a higher and better web hosting uptime may be your only option.
Does your web require good server uptime? Sign up for Marble Host, a web hosting company which offers 99.9% uptime hosting.
Reseller Web Hosting Explained
Reseller web hosting is a web hosting service that re-bundles services available from real hosts or primary providers. Reseller web hosting could be an individual or small business that makes use of the bandwidth and web servers of a higher tier provider or primary host and resells the same to the customers by offering value added services like web designing, domain registration and web programming.
Most real hosting companies allow reseller web hosting in order to boost their sales. Recently, a significant number of web hosting businesses have infiltrated the internet with an eye on the ever-growing number of people who are jumping online. In order to remain competitive, hosting companies look for ways to market their services to a greater number of people rather than offering their services individually. This leads to the business of reseller web hosting accounts. In reseller web hosting, real hosts are able to generate bulk businesses and delegate individual clients to reseller servers. In turn, reseller web hosting businesses look after some individual client’s needs. This is a win-win situation for both, since real hosts will have an intermediary in the form of reseller web hosting to individual customers without having to attend to them one by one. The reseller is also able to put up a business and earn income without having to shell out capital outlays. Although in some instances they do compete with each other for a fair share of the web hosting market, the real hosts can still benefit from this set-up considering they do charge a certain amount from resellers.
The services offered by a reseller web hosting service do not really differ from a real host. As a matter of fact, reseller web hosting offers more features to the customers. Due to the added value services, reseller web hosting can offer web design and programming services to each customer that are often times not possible from real hosts. Real hosts tend to focus on bulk accounts and corporate clients. Reseller web hosting offers value added services to customers in order to maintain a competitive edge against bigger web hosting services.
Reseller web hosting is also better able to establish friendly relationship with their customers that go beyond the contract terms. This is the secret for those successful reseller web-hosting services. They fill the need that bigger hosting servers cannot provide. Those who want to start a reseller web hosting business are advised to look for a real host, such as Hostgator or SpeedHostingZ.com. It is very easy to obtain a reseller account from a real host these days.
If you need simple hosting services for your web site and you prefer to have personal attention from the web host for design and programming then a reseller web hosting account is highly recommended. However, if you have a business website that requires complex e-commerce solutions, have a very large number of customers accessing your web site or you have a large number of websites to be hosted, a reseller hosting would probably not suffice. This is particularly true for e-businesses. For this, you need a real host provider for your web site.
For a complete set of web hosting resources for both home and business, please visit http://helpfulwebhosting.com
Web Hosting and Transfer or Bandwidth
So, you have your domain name and you have designed a website or had a website built for you, now what. Well, of course you need hosting. A lot of people want to start a business online but are not aware of some of the basics like how people are able to view or visit your website.
What is web hosting? Right now, if you have already built your website, all of those files are on your computer. People who are surfing the web don’t have access to your computer, therefore cannot find your website. Advanced users know they can turn their computer into a server where people are actually coming to their computer to view their website, however, this is not recommended and certainly not recommended for someone who is not very advanced as a computer technician.
There are computers who are set up to be servers. These are called host computers as well to simplify things. You need to upload your website files to the hosting computer so they can make it available for others to view on the web. This is the service we call web hosting.
Will just any web host do? No. This is a common misunderstanding about web hosting. All web hosts are not created equal. There are many different levels of web hosting and many different plans and packages to consider. There are also many other things you have to consider when choosing a web hosting company. Let’s go over one of the most important issues when choosing a web hosting plan to help you understand better.
A lot depends on your individual needs. Will your website have a lot of graphics and images? Will it have movies? Music downloads? Software or other downloads? Or is it a very simple and compact website that is mostly text? Do you expect a lot of traffic to your website?
The reason for all those questions is something called “bandwidth” or “transfer”. The amount of storage space a web-hosting plan offers you is usually far less important than the amount of transfer or bandwidth the web host offers you.
Every time someone visits your webpage, every file included in that webpage is downloaded from your website to their computer. In other words, from the web host’s computer to the visitor’s computer. This includes each graphic or image on the page, every icon, even the html page itself is downloaded by a user just visiting your webpage. The size of each of those files being transferred to the visitors computer is the amount of “transfer” or “bandwidth” you are using.
Let’s say you get 100 visitors per day to your website. Let’s also say that your html page is around 15k and you have 5 images on that webpage that altogether are around 50k. That means each visitor to your website is using up 65k in bandwidth every time they visit that page. Let’s also say your average visitor opens 3 pages within your website and those pages are the same size as your main page. That means each visitor uses 195k minimum and that is if they don’t keep going back to your main page.
Multiply that 195k times the 100 visitors per day you get and you are using 19,500k or a little over 19 megabytes of transfer per day. Multiply that by 30 days and you get 585,000k or 585 megabytes of “transfer” or “bandwidth” used per month.
Now if your web hosting plan allows for more bandwidth than you think you will need, then you know you are okay there. However, make sure you know upfront what the cost of going over your allotted bandwidth is. Some webhosts charge a lot for every megabyte you use over the limit they set for you in the plan you chose. It’s a good idea to pick a webhosting plan that is just one step above the one you think you need to allow for growth. You might become very popular like a rock star overnight!
D. David Dugan recommends the web hosting solutions offered by DD&C at http://hosting.dugancom.com Hosting popular sites like the article directory http://www.articlemotron.com is one of their specialties.