Very Basic Key Criteria in Choosing Web Hosts
Jun 07 '01
The Bottom Line The very basic discussions on when you need web hosting service, and the exact procedure in choosing paid web hosting companies.
In the last one or two years, the domain registration industry faced very sever price discount competitions. Some domain registration service offered very nice time-limited offers with which you can register your own domain at the price of $5.95. At this price, the domain registration companies can't make enough revenue to cover the costs. Thus many companies started domain hosting service.
When you see the advertisement for the domain registration service, you probably think about launching your own web site with your own domain name. In this review, I discuss the very basic key criteria in choosing web hosts.
Notice that the domain registration service is different from web hosting service. I am not going to cover the domain registration part.
background information
Even though I mentioned domain names, they are not always necessary for subscribing web hosting service. Let me give you two examples.
The first example is the web sites which are constructed under somebody else's domain name. For example, if you are an Earthlink user, you can get the web space at http://home.earthlink.net/(user_name)/ . It sounds a little strange. But in this case, you basically chose Earthlink as your web host. The free web space providers such as VirtualAvenue, Prohosting, and Geocities are included in this category.
The second example is a little more complicated. As you might have realized during you are on the internet, there are a lot of web sites which don't have domain names. To be more specific, your web site URL can be http://(numbers).(numbers).(numbers).(numbers)/ . These numbers represent the address on the internet.
Note that all the web site URLs are re-written in this format. And only because the numbers are neither intuitive nor easy to remember, people assign the domain name as an alias. Thus if you only need your own separated web space, you don't have to register your domain names. Some underground and offensive sites use this method, because the site owner doesn't have to reveal his name through the domain registration information.
(By the way, this address, http://216.52.17.42/ , is for Epinions.Com. Try this address, you will see the Epinions' original top page.)
relevance to your web designing capability
If you are a very beginner in designing/building web sites, it is not the good idea to jump on to the paid web hosting service.
The main reason is that with paid web hosting service, you have much higher controllability over the web system, which in turn means you need to do a lot of things on your own. If you don't know how to make one single page as you desire, your chance of messing up the entire system is pretty high.
Another reason is that if you subscribe a paid web hosting service, you have high chances of loosing your own money. Even though the web hosting service is getting cheaper, the risk of loosing the money must be minimized, if possible.
Obviously, free web hosting services are free of charge. Thus the second concern is easily solved with free web hosting services. Regarding with the first concern, you want to minimize your chance of crashing entire web site. Usually, free web hosting services don't give you the full-fledged power to change the system file settings. Thus by choosing a free web hosting service, you can reduce this type of risks intentionally.
When is a paid web hosting service necessary?
If you believe you need a paid web hosting service, you should have at least one of the following two reasons. The two reasons are a marketing reason and the control over the system files.
marketing reasons
Today, nobody doubts the power of internet. If you can successfully market your service or product on the internet, your cost-to-profit ratio will become extremely small. For the commercial parties, the strong internet presence is a must.
You can present your products and services with some free web space providers. However, there exists big demerits. Many major search engines index only the pages at the root domain level. To be more specific, the only top page located at http://www.(some_name).com/ or something similar can be listed at the search engines. Some search engines index the pages in lower directories. But this happens only if the page is reachable by following the links from the top page.
Because of this, if you are serious about strengthening your internet presence, the paid web hosting service is necessary.
control over the system files
The big plus in subscribing a paid web hosting service is that you can control the system files, and create an interactive web site. For example, if you need to create the database to track users' activities, you need to have the access to the raw log files as well as to the server side script languages such as CGI, PHP, ASP, and so on.
It is possible that some free web hosting services offer this type of tools, but I don't think they will satisfy your serious demands. Simply put, seriously interactive web pages require a paid web hosting service.
How to choose paid web hosting services
Now, let me proceed to my main points.
If you have enough knowledge to construct one web site on your own, and also if you have the good reasons to subscribe the paid web hosting services, you should start your own research.
Since you should have the good reasons, I assume you know what features you need. Let me save the space, and jump to the explanation on how exactly to choose the paid web hosting service.
1. Set up your budget line
These days, the web hosting plan starts with about $7 per month. If your web site will have at most several pages, the cheapest plan is fine.
The question is when you are going to build decently large web sites. You should be able to allow at least $15 per month. But the tricky part is that the higher price doesn't always mean the good service. You have to know what exactly you need, and set up your budget line, accordingly.
2. Do the extensive research
Once you know your budget, you should start looking around. There are a lot of web hosting review sites. The good places to start with are:
http://www.tophosts.com/
http://www.webhostdir.com/
http://www.hostsearch.com
http://www.webhostlist.com
http://www.findahost.com
http://www.webhosters.com
http://www.hostcompare.com/
Note that besides the hosting package features, you have to pay your attention to the user reviews. Many of the directory sites have their own sponsors, and try to earn the referral fee. You cannot always trust what the site owner says. Shop around and focus on the comments from the service subscribers.
3. Check the stability of hosting company's system
One of the major mistakes by beginners is in checking the hosting server's stability. People tend to see the hosting server's stability by checking the hosting company's top page. This is not a good idea at all. Usually, the hosting companies use the most stable and strong server for their own web site. And that server is likely to be different from what your space will actually be assigned to.
The simplest way to solve this problem is to check user's comments. Some users leave their web URL in their comments. Go to their pages, and check if the loading speed is fast enough. Pinging to the domain is another good idea. Notice that you need to repeat this procedure with the decent time lags. Even if the server is working right now, you don't know if it will be working tomorrow as well.
4. Contact hosting companies
By now, you should have been satisfied mainly with non-human system at a hosting company. It's the time to make a human contact.
The biggest problem at this stage is an uneducated sales representatives. Many of them are working on commission base, and don't pay much attention once you tell them your credit card numbers. I had extremely bad experiences more than a few times in this regard.
Don't trust anything, if the person on the other end of the phone line is a sales rep. Once you start subscribing the package, the only people you need to talk with are the technical support reps. You need to make sure that the technical support team is reliable.
Ask the sales rep some very strange or geeky questions, and put the technical support on the phone. The examples of the "strange" questions are: "Can I run Perl/CGI scripts at the root directory?" and "Do you support customizing .htaccess files?"
You don't have to know what these example questions are all about. The bottom line is if the technical support can answer. If they cannot answer with 100% confidence, that web hosting company isn't a good choice.
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