How to choose a web host
One of the hardest decisions for me in the beginning was which web host to choose. It was frustrating because there were so many web hosts that offered lots of things I just did not understand. My biggest problem was that I did not even know what to base my decision on! This article will help you make that decision. Hoping to spare you some of that pain, you will find tips on what to consider when choosing a free web host or a commercial web host.
Generally speaking, I suggest that unless your website is nothing more than a hobby, you should avoid using the free web hosts. I am as cheap as they come, believe me. But, even though you will spend some money each month on your web host, I feel it is worth it. Let’s examine some of the features of both types.
Choosing a Free Web Host
1. Advertising
One main drawback about using a free web host is that most of them will advertise on your website. This is one way that they can cover the costs of hosting your site and the services they provide. They might place a banner on your pages, display a pop-up window when each page loads, or even use some other creative forms of advertising. When you are choosing your web host, see if you can find out what types of advertisements they will place on your pages.
You should be skeptical of free web hosts who do not advertise, because without a chance to cover their costs, there is a good chance they will not survive or may not even be trustworthy.
2. Amount of web space
How much web space will you need? Most websites use well under 10MB per site, but that number could be higher or lower depending on how many pages you have and how many video and audio files. For a more detailed look, read the article, How much web space do I need?
3. FTP access
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol (find the definition for FTP here).
You want to make sure that your hosting provider allows FTP access. Some free hosting providers may only allow you to design your page with their online builder. That might be fine in the beginning, but at some point you will want to be able to upload your files. If they do not offer FTP access, find another host. Trust me.
4. File limitations
One big issue to watch out for is a limit on the maximum size of the files you upload. Some sites restrict the file types you can upload to HTML and GIF/JPG files. I would avoid these webhosts if at all possible.
5. Reliability and access speed
This is something you may not think about, but it is extremely important. If your host is frequently down or super slow, you will lose a lot of visitors. Just imagine if you searched for a site on the internet and it was constantly down or very slow to load. You would stop going to that site. You should be able to find out a percentage of their reliability or average times. If you can’t find that out, ask somebody, or test it over a period of time, during peak and non-peak hours.
6. PHP and Perl
You can find definitions for PHP and Perl here.
I am a big fan of PHP and use it a lot in my Phils Baseball site, but I wouldn’t suggest using it with a free web host because they might be too restrictive and cause more of a headache than it’s worth.
Besides, you can find most of the cool features you want on your site through free script hosting services rather than using PHP and Perl. They can provide you with countdowns, search engines, forms, polls, mailing lists, and many more.
That said, if you still want to try, you need to first make sure they offer PHP and Perl access to begin with. Additionally, you need to know if the kind of environment your scripts run under is too restrictive to use PHP and Perl.
7. Amount of bandwidth
Many free web hosts have a limit on the bandwidth, which is the amount of traffic your website can use per day and per month. Therefore, if your site is visited above a certain number of times per day (or per month), the web host will disable your web site. Generally, 1-3GB of traffic per month is usually enough for a new website, depending of course on what you plan to do with your site.
Choosing a Commercial Web Host
1. Reliability and access speed
A good commercial web host is reliable, fast, and guarantees its uptime (the time when it works properly). Look for an absolute minimum of 99%. That is still way too low and I would suggest 99.5% or higher. Think about it, would you want your site to be out of service for 1 hour/minute/day out of 100? The host should provide some sort of refund if they fall below that figure. You probably have no way of enforcing it, but at least it shows a bit of commitment on the part of your host.
2. Data transfer and bandwidth
Data transfer, also known as “traffic” or “bandwidth”, is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site.
Some web hosts advertise that they have “unlimited bandwidth”. I’ll say it now: don’t use those sites. Bandwith is something each host has to pay for, and there is a limit to how much they will pay. The host that offers unlimited amounts know this too, and they almost always find a way to limit the bandwith in some way. The way I see it, any web host that offers unlimited bandwith is trying to trick you and cannot be trusted.
It’s a similar story for web hosts that offer incredibly huge amounts of bandwidth. In this situation, they will probably not be able to meet that limit because they simply don’t have enough resources. This is not as shady as the “unlimited bandwith” practice, but they are still trying to trick you a bit.
What are the typical traffic requirements?
There is no set formula, but the requirements of your site will largely depend on the number of visitors, web page size (which is much larger if you have things like embedded images, movies, and music files), and large file downloads.
For example, consider a web site with 200 web pages where each page is 50KB in size (which is a pretty average size). If this web site gets 400 visitors each day and each visitor views 3 pages on an average, the web site would be transferring 400 (visitors) X 3 (number of pages viewed) X 50KB (file size of web page) = 60,000KB or 60MB each day or 1.8 GB per month.
Check their policies to see if there is an overage charge per GB over the allowed bandwidth. Also check to see if you need to pre-pay for potential coverage, which you do not want to do.
3. Disk space
As with bandwidth, be careful with web hosts that offer “unlimited disk space”. Most sites need less than 10 MB of web space, so keep that in mind if a host offers you 200 MB or sometimes “unlimited space.” So generally speaking, your site will probably never even come close to 50MB in your entire lifetime.
4. Technical support
This is extremely easy to overlook, but it does matter. Do they offer around the clock technical support, 365 days per year? It might sound trivial, but you probably do not want a host that takes off on holidays and weekends. Websites do not take the weekend off, so neither should your host.
Having said that, you should investigate by sending them emails late at night and on weekends to see how quickly they respond and what type of responses they provide.
5. Other important items to have
You want to make sure you have FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, MySQL, and crontabs. Some web hosts actually do not allow you to install PHP or Perl scripts (click here for a definition of PHP and Perl) without their approval. This would mean that you have to wait for them before doing certain things on your site. You would therefore need “.htaccess” if you are to do things like customizing your error pages. You may not know or care about these things now, but you might decide you need them later. I had no plans of using PHP or any of those other things at first, but when I did, I sure was happy that my web host offered them, or I would have needed to switch.
MySQL is needed for many features or if you want to run a blog or a content management system. Telnet or SSH access is useful for certain things like testing certain scripts or maintaining databases. Cron is a type of program scheduler that lets you run programs at specific times of the day. Check to see if they provide these features.
6. SSL or shopping carts
This is something you might want in order to do business through your website. Just in case you might need it, you should at least check to make sure it is something they offer. SSL is something you need in order to accept credit card payments on your site.
7. Email features
You want to have special email for your site, like contact@example.com or something. It makes you look more professional, and it means you will not fill up your personal email if you get a lot of visitors. This is a very basic function and one that every host should provide. Will they let you set up an email account that can reroute any email address at your domain to you? Can you set an email address to automatically reply to the sender with a preset message (called an autoresponder)? Can you retrieve your mail with your email software? Can it be automatically forwarded to your current email address?
8. Control Panel or cPanel
Each host should (or better!) have some sort of control panel. They call it different names, but basically it is an area where you can manage different aspects of your web account yourself. They should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account.
For someone who is not particularly technically savvy, I think this is extremely important to have a good, logical control panel. Investigate their control panel and compare it to other hosts. If they show screen shots, does their control panel seem easy to understand? When I used my first web host, I didn’t know what half of their things meant and had the hardest time navigating. Believe me, that is not something you want to be wasting your time on.
9. Multiple Domain Hosting and Subdomains
If you are thinking of selling web space or having multiple domains or subdomains hosted in your account, you should look to see if they provide this, and how much they charge for it.
10. Server
You may not know or care about the type of server at the moment, but it can make a difference, depending on what you do.
If you want to use things like write/use ASP programs, you will need to have a Windows server.
In fact, if dynamically generated pages that can access databases is what you want, you can always use PHP (which is more popular and what I used for my Phils Baseball site) instead of ASP.
Otherwise, you can use Unix systems running on the Apache server. Unix-based web hosts, which include web hosts using systems like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, allow you to configure a lot of things that you typically need on your site (like error pages, protecting your images, and blocking IP addresses) without having to ask your web host to implement them. I hope to add articles about configuring Apache servers soon.
11. Price
Web hosts cost anywhere from $6 dollars per month and up. Please do not just choose a web host strictly because of price. Even if you do not understand certain things, use the tips above to research these web hosts and it will be time well spent. You don’t need to be looking for which host offers the most. Try to find a web host that offers the services you want. Oh, and just because they are the most expensive does not mean they are the best.
Most web hosts will charge you less for an annual plan than for a monthly plan. Especially if you are a beginner, I would hesitate to agree to a yearly plan right away. Make sure you are satisfied with their reliability and service before signing up long term. If you don’t like what they offer or if your plans change on what you need, this gives you the option to switch to someone else. Even if they guarantee to refund the balance if I’m dissatisfied, you don’t know for sure that they will honor that.
12. Others’ Reviews
Sometimes the best way to decide on your web host is by listening to others. There are many newsgroups out there where people comment on the different web hosts. You can also read my article, Which web host do you use?
In conclusion
I know this decision can be a bit overwhelming, but don’t get too caught up in what you need from your web host. Do your research. Learn what you can about the different things web hosts offer. Then just try to give an educated guess as to who you should use and go with. You won’t be perfectly happy with any host, so it is a guessing game no matter what. Just hope for the best.
