Choosing the Right Web Hosting
By Mark John

So, you've been thinking about doing a website for a quite a while, have ideas and plans about what you want to do it about and how its going to look etc... There's just one factor your unsure of; what web host to choose. First, lets define a web host, a web host is a web hosting service that is there to provide a service which typically consists of a few staple services and then there are all of the added extras which undoubtedly cost more money.

There are of course so many web hosting providers out there it can be difficult to know which one to pick as there are numerous factors involved. If money is a concern then you may be tempted to go with a cheaper provider, but they may not be able to meet your needs, and if they do they could be a scam or a "fly by night" provider that offers a great deal one minute and is gone the next. You may alternatively take the opposite approach and spend liberally and end up paying too much for services that you've barely even used. It is also a good idea to find out if you host is trustworthy in the sense that they might offer a lot, but deliver very little, this can be done by searching the web for reviews and testimonials or by visiting a forum that may have some answers to you questions.

Web Hosting Services

You are definitely going to want to know what services are offered by any web hosting provider you are looking into, because if they don't/cannot provide the services you require then they are no good. You may require services as important as large quantities of bandwidth or as small as access to the Apache mod_rewrite engine, but either way if you require it then it is a must.

Typical Services

The typical services provided are web space which is a like a remote hard drive in the sense of you can store files and web pages there and you have a finite amount of space as which can range from anything like a few megabytes to many gigabytes. The next service provided is bandwidth which is how many people can access your site and its contents over a specified period of time; if say you have 1GB of bandwidth per month, and 1024 people came to your site and each used 1mb of bandwidth whilst browsing over a period of a few days then you would be all out of bandwidth. Of course this bandwidth example is somewhat unrealistic, but it does illustrate a point which is that if you predict a lot of traffic or are hosting big files then you are going to require a lot of bandwidth. As an example, web space and bandwidth would both be the defining factors if you were going to host music or video files for an, but generally web space is if you have a lot of content/files and bandwidth if you have or are predicting a lot of traffic.

Another service you will likely want is support, how good and reliable is there support service, web host providers may boast about "24/7" support, but it might be a good idea to check. You could do this by using forums, maybe their own forum or searching the Internet; you could even try E-mail their support team with a genuine or innocuous question and see how long it takes them to respond and how good their answer is.

Advanced Services

The more advanced services are those that are typically required when the website or service you're providing is going to require access to a database, the use of server side scripting or CGI; the list of course goes on. All of the services available should be listed in the supported features area of the selected web hosting package.

Certain features have certain dependencies or at least it's a good idea for them to go together such as if you were to say require the use of ASP scripting language, then you are going to be wanting a host that offers a Windows based server with ASP available. If you want to use the PHP scripting language then there is a good chance you are going to want a database such as MySQL to take full advantage of this language and manage all your data. There are other things such as search engine friendly URLs which are going to require access to Apache's mod_rewrite engine, this will require a server that uses the Apache web server and allows access to the mod_rewrite engine. These are just some examples as there are many services ranging from crucial to frivolous.

Final Word

There are many things that you may or may not require and a lot of which also seem to come in pairs. This means it's going to be up to you to decide what it is you plan to do with your web site and decide what you are going to need to make it work, this tends to require some research in order to make the correct decision, because there's nothing worse than spending a load of money for some services and finding out they do not meet your requirements.

By Mark John at http://www.jenntree.com and http://www.markjohn.org

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