Choosing a Web Hosting Provider Company
Once you get a domain name (see Domain Name Registration above), the next step to starting your website involves finding a web hosting company (or ISP, Internet Service Provider). These are companies that usually have massive, redundant direct connections to the Internet. They have rooms filled with servers, and your website will reside on one of these servers.
Depending on the needs of your business, you have several hosting options:
- shared hosting - where you might share a single server with 100 other websites
- dedicated hosting - where you lease and have control over a server for your own use
- co-location - where you provide and set up your own equipment at the host facilities (they provide the Internet connection for the server)
So while the server is physically connected to the Internet, you use an FTP (file transfer protocol) program (from your home or office computer) to remotely send your web files, text and graphics, from your computer to these remote servers. Costs range from free, to $10 or $20 for shared hosting, to $49-$249 for dedicated, to several hundred dollars (or more) for co-located equipment. Which solution you choose depends on your needs - how powerful a server you need, how much bandwidth you need, how much hands on tweaking you want to do. We'll consider these factors below.
Another choice you'll be making is how much you want to spend.
Free Web Hosting: The catch here is that most of these companies (like Bravenet.com, Geocities.com, web1000.com, Doteasy.com) require you to display ads on your pages - they collect the ad revenue while you get free hosting. To be honest, this is pretty much just for fun, amateur pages, and they serve that purpose fine. If you are serious about having your own website, you need to go with a commerical web hosting company.
Commerical Web Hosting: Commercial Web Hosts charge you a monthly fee for hosting your website on their servers. There are literally tens of thousands of these companies around the globe. You can visit Tophosts.com for reviews and recommendations of web hosts. They cover everything from budget hosting to e-commerce concerns in greater details than we will go into here.
Some sample hosting providers are:
We've had personal experience with most of these - be sure to check out the highlighted ones above - many include free domain name registration as part of the package. As you can see, prices range from a few bucks (budget) to $30-$50 (midrange) for basic hosting, which will likely meet 80-90% of most people's needs. Try a Google search for "web hosting" and click some of the paid links on the right side of the results page and explore - these will be companies PAYING to have you come and check them out, so they mean business.
So what criteria should you use when selecting a host?
- Reliability/Stability: Pick someone who has been around at least a few years. You want to know they have kept customers happy for many years and have a solid business plan.
- Cost: For many people, cost is a big issue when they are getting started. No one wants to shell out $249/mo when they can get by on $9.95. As long as you have your own domain name, you can always switch hosts at any time, and you can also upgrade from one type of hosting account to another with your provider, so you are usually safe in selecting a lower cost solution when you begin.
- Type of server: Shared servers are the most common. Your host company will have many servers, and your site will be one of 20 or 200 on a single server. You have access to a special directory on the server (via your FTP login) where you store your files. To the outside world, it is your own site, your own server. This is a fine solution for probably 85% of all websites. The only consideration here is performance. If your site is SUPER busy, or someone you are sharing with is SUPER busy, performance for everyone can suffer (pages take longer to load). However, with high speed internet connections and server performance tuning, this is not generally a major issue. And if you grow to be that successful that you need to move on, your provider can move your files over to a dedicated server. A dedicated servers is all yours - the host company provides it and handles the main support duties to keep it running. But no one else bogs down your machine, and you can add functionality to it, run your own databases, whatever, without bothering anyone else. This usually entails some extra work, but some people have special needs (and special skills!) and want to take on full responsibility for all aspects of their servers performance and settings. In terms of operating systems, if you plan on using ASP scripting, you need MS Windows. Unix is still the most popular, allowing you to run the Apache web server, PHP, MySQL, and just about everything under the sun. Most tech-heads prefer Unix-based (Linux, FreeBSD) systems.
- Technical Support: Nothing worse than having a great site and having it crash! Can you reach support staff by phone or email only? Turnaround time on problems? To be honest, most hosting providers are very reliable these days in terms of uptime, however real live support can vary greatly from host to host. Try calling the number they list for support and see if you can reach a live person.
- Disk Space and Bandwidth: Disk space is just the amount of storage you need to hold all your files (html, graphics, database, etc.). With hard drives getting cheaper by the year, most hosts offer adequate storage, with a small surcharge if you need more space. Think about your website needs - will it use lots of large graphics, video, or animations? Will it be mostly text? How many pages will you have? Storage is usually not an issue for most websites. Bandwidth is the amount of data sent across the Internet pipes when people access your website - every HTML page, every image has a certain file size, and all that data added together is the bandwidth you use. Let's say a user accesses your homepage (15K text, 45K graphics) and then visits 4 similar pages in your site. That is 240KB, or 1/4 MB of data. 100 visitors per day gets you to 40MB of data pretty quick. Make sure your host offers adequate bandwidth (many gigabytes is nice, some offer 100GB or more, and a few offer "unmetered", meaning you don't have to worry about how popular your site becomes). Watch out for surcharges for extra bandwidth use - a traffic spike can send your monthly bill through the roof. Most hosts allow you the option to temporarily shut down your site instead of consuming excess bandwidth, so there are no surprise charges.
- Scripting/Database: Will your site use CGI scripting, or PHP? These are pretty much standard, but you'll want to make sure your web hosting provider has the additional services and functions you may require. Will your site be database driven via MySQL? Do you need shopping cart software or secure socket layer (SSL) capabilities for credit card transactions? Again, most of these functions are pretty common in hosting solutions ranging from $19.99 on up. Make sure the host you choose offers what you need. Again, Yahoo Small Business offers some pretty good accounts with credit card processing, tons of bandwidth, full PHP and MySQL access, etc. They are worth a look.
- Email: Most people send and receive their email through their web hosting provider (email@yourdomain.com). Most providers allow plenty of mail boxes, and you usually only need a handful of addresses. Can you forward your email to another address (some people have 10 websites and like to get all their mail in one place)? Also important is autoresponders - automatic email replies to incoming mail, such as newsletter confirmations, answers to typical questions, etc.
One item that is usually immaterial is geographic location - even if you are in Florida, it doesn't matter if your web host provider is in Arkansas or New York. As long as you have your Internet connection and FTP access, you can send and receive files back and forth from the server from any remote location.
So that is the long and short of it. Get your domain name setup, select a shared host that is affordable and has a good track record for reliability and offers the functions you need, and get started. For 85% of us, that is all you'll ever need.
Start here for information:
Blue Hosting (easy web hosting $6.95)
Easy CGI (#1 rated, less than $8)
