Selecting a Web Host
One of the first thing you need to do before setting up your website is to get an online hosting space to store all your web files. Finding a reliable web hosting company is not as easy as it seems. More often than not, you also need to consider additional important criteria other than the price. This article aims to help you (both beginners and intermediate Webmasters) to better identify a suitable web hosting company.
Where to host my files?
Some of you may consider hosting your files in the United States other than your local country (if you are not from US). If your target market (visitors to your site) is within your country, then acquiring a host locally is a good step to start. However, you can also work around and notify Google to make your site targeted to your specific country. Refer to this official Google blog post on how you can achieve Geo-targeting.
One disadvantage of hosting your files outside United States is that you may need to pay a higher price because your local hosting companies may not be as competitive as those from the United States. For example, you will find hosting your files in Singapore is much more expensive than most companies in the United States.
Type of hosting environment
This is referring to the software operational environment. Most hosting companies provide two types of environment, Windows and Linux. Linux servers have better security and are consistently reliable as compared to Windows as they are highly targeted for exploitation.
You may also want to consider the language of your web application when deciding a web host. Is your application powered by ASP technology? Comparing the two environment, Windows tend to support ASP applications better.
Shared or dedicated hosting
Most Internet Entrepreneurs start off their websites by hosting in a shared server environment. This means that the server is also hosting other websites besides yours. If other sites consume a lot of resources from the server, your site may be affected (your visitors may experience a longer loading time). The advantage of a shared hosting is its affordable price.
If you are running a highly complex and resource intensive site, dedicated hosting would be a much better choice for you. The server will only host your files and all the resources are dedicated to your site. Some companies also provide managed and un-managed options for dedicated hosting customers. Most Webmasters will select the managed package as it comes with almost everything configured. Dedicated hosting costs around ten to twenty times more than normal shared hosting.
Key Considerations
The following are some of the important areas you should consider when choosing a web host:
- Bandwidth. This is the amount of data your site can transfer within a month. For a start, you will find a 10GB / month plan sufficient. This assumes that your site does not providing any image or video hosting / streaming.
- Disk Space. This is the amount of space that you can use to store all your web files such as html, images, videos and dynamic scripts. A typical website rarely uses more than 1GB within a year.
- PHP / MySQL. The host should at least support PHP and MySQL technology. Most scripts and applications run on these open-source technologies. Depending on your needs for your specific applications, you may not find these two technologies applicable.
- Cpanel control. This application will give you a dashboard control over your web hosting account. Cpanel is by far the most popular control for most Webmasters. You can also install sophisticated application easily via Cpanel, Fantastico feature.
- Addon domain. Without addon capability, your hosting account can only host a website. It is essential for Internet Entrepreneurs to host more than one site most of the times. This feature should be free without any additional charges.
- Cron Jobs. Most basic sites may not require this but you may eventually need this feature to run time-specific scripts for your visitors.
There are many other features provided by most hosting companies but they are not as critical as compared to the above.
Support / Customer Service
When you are doing research, look out for what customers say about a company's support. It is unavoidable to encounter difficulties with your site at times. Hence, you need to contact the support staff at the soonest time. A good hosting company should provide knowledge base, support forum, ticketing system and even a live chat (with at least 90% availability).
Conduct research on web hosting companies
With Google, it has never been so easy to perform research on web hosting companies. On the other hand, it is also as easy for the hosting companies to put up good reviews themselves. A good way to filter out fake reviews is to only read the reviews from live community. You can start off by doing a search on a web hosting company name in Web Hosting Talk forum. You will then be presented with lots of relevant feedback from the customers. Take note of the time when the poster make a comment. You may only interested in recent reviews.
The reason why you should avoid reading reviews from web pages returned by Google is because most sites contain affiliate links to the web hosting companies. You will not know who are writing real reviews as they may only interested in the commission when someone sign up through their links. If you are an experienced Internet Marketer, you will have no problem isolating these questionable reviews by investigating the affiliate links and site structure.
Do I register a domain name first or web hosting?
There are no difference in getting either one before another. However, to hasten the process, you should register for a domain name before signing up a web host. Refer to our Domain Names guide on how to select an appropriate domain name for your website.
What web hosting company do you recommend?
As this article is purely meant to share and educate the readers on choosing their appropriate web hosting companies, I would not want to recommend any companies here. If you are interested to know what hosting company we host our site on, you can contact me using this form.
This article is written by KC TAN. You may reprint this article only with a live link back to WebSprout Consulting.
