Choosing an excellent host: 3 steps

Choosing a Web hosting services provider can be a challenge. There are literally thousands of companies that offer countless products and services. It can be a difficult task for a novice as well as for a seasoned professional, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve broken the process down into three steps:

Step One: Free or Paid Hosting?
Step Two: Determine Expectations
Step Three: Compare Hosts in the Right Category

Step One: Free or Paid Hosting?
To Pay or Not To Pay?
A large percentage of Web sites are ‘free’ and posted by individuals for personal reasons. Typically, these sites are associated with one of the larger portals such as Yahoo or AOL and consist of a page or two with limited content. If you’re looking to put up a personal site like this, look no further than the solutions offered by these two companies. The tools and applications such as email, community interest portals and photo management software provided are straightforward and make setting your site up very easy.

The downside to free hosting? Generally you'll have to put up with banner ads on your homepage or other ads you don’t get to pick. To be fair, it’s how these companies can afford to set up your infrastructure for free. All the same, you have no control over whose ad shows up on your site. If that’s unacceptable, a paid hosting solution (some start lower than $5/mo) might be your best bet. Some low cost solutionas are EasyCGI, IPower, and StartLogic.

Most Web hosting companies bundle services into a series of packages. The standard hosting service component is normally a bundle of disk storage space (where your site is stored) and bandwidth (the capacity for data transfer of a wired or wireless communication system.) In addition, hosting companies usually bundle email services with standard plans. The email service contains POP and IMAP solutions which direct email received through your site to desktop applications (Outlook® or Exchange®.) “Web-mail” is also provided to view and manage email through a Web browser.

Frequently, small businesses want a Web site that functions only as an online brochure that provides information about the business but not sell products. Standard packages are ideal if you’re building a simple brochure site. Additional service packages offer eCommerce, media intensive applications for video and audio sharing and dedicated servers, designed to back-up more complex business requirements. Paid solutions pretty much come down to whether you’re going to sell products and services online or just display information in a brochure format and what kind of customer and technical support you’ll require.

Step Two: Determine Expectations
You Get What you Pay For
There are basically two price levels prevalent in Web hosting. There’s a large group of Low Price or Discount hosts that offer nice solutions from below $5 to $15 per month and there are hosts that offer solutions that start above $15 and the pricing goes up from there. Companies such as Affinity have developed a number of different hosting brands to help simplify the customer experience. As an example, Affinity uses the HostSave and WinSave brands for their low-cost hosting solutions and the ValueWeb brand for their premium services.

Customer service is usually the primary difference between inexpensive hosting solutions and the higher priced options. Here’s where the “you get what you pay for” maxim comes into play. Prior to choosing a provider its important to determine how serious you are. In other words, if the site is your small business lifeline, where you’ll find customers, display, sell and even ship products you probably don’t want a hosting company that won’t answer calls when there’s a problem. On the contrary, many experienced professionals would rather not talk to someone and prefer technical support and customer service through email or online chat.

Clarifying expectations ahead of time can mean the difference between a great online experience or completely frustrated and without support. The extra $10 per month may be worth the piece of mind it buys.

Step Three: Compare Hosts in the Right Category
Once you know whether you need a standard hosting plan or an eCommerce solution and whether low price or premium (a.k.a. better customer support) hosting is right for you, it’s time to shop. Any of the major search engines will provide a multitude of responses with a query such as Web Hosting or eCommerce hosting. You can even narrow your search with more definition. A search for “Cheap eCommerce hosting” will yield mostly companies whose solutions fall in the low price category. Actually, you don't even have to go to a search engine to find cheap hosts. Everything you need is here. Go to Hosting Reviews and you will find a large list of hosts, all with reviews, user comments and ratings. From there you can find the cheapest or best host to suit your needs.

Take some time and visit several hosting company’s Web sites. Go over plan options and see which offer the services and support that match your expectations. Because of the similarities, hosting plans can become confusing. Most major providers have a “Compare Plans” page you can print. Its good to print out the various packages and have them in hand while you shop.

Using Affinity’s ValueWeb brand as an example, some hosts offer a portal where you’re free to ask existing customers if they’re satisfied and recommend the provider. Look for this function as you shop, it’s an excellent tool in how to determine whether a company is right for you. Unless you’re an experienced professional you shouldn’t buy a solution without at least first talking to a sales rep at the company. This gives a sense of the company’s commitment to its customers. Many also call the technical support numbers to see how long it takes to answer and how friendly and knowledgeable the staff is. Companies such as Affinity, combined sales and support departments so when you order an account you’re talking to a technical support representative as well. This creates a forum in which all questions can be answered without having to be transferred to other departments.

It’s important to find a hosting relationship that fits your needs and who’s level of involvement you feel comfortable with. Following these steps will make choosing a Web hosting solution easier and, hopefully, even fun.

Web Hosting Features

How do I know a good web hosting service from a bad one? What features should I be looking for when choosing a web host? What is bandwidth or transfer? How much storage space do I really need? What tools should they offer me and which ones do I need?

In this article I will attempt to give you the short version of answers to those questions for you to use as a reference. A lot about choosing a web-hosting provider depends on what your website needs and every website has different needs.

First question was “How do I know a good web hosting service from a bad one?” Before doing business with anyone on the web that is going to be as important to your business as a web hosting company, you should do a search on the name of the company and look for criticisms, complaints, etc. Keep in mind no one has 100% satisfied customers and finding just one complaint on the web doesn’t mean that the company is a bad one. However if you find a lot of complaints, I would move on to the next provider.

Now about the bandwidth and transfer question I mentioned above. Bandwidth and transfer are basically the same thing. Some tech guy might know a difference I’m not aware of, but it won’t be much difference. This is the number of times each file in your website is downloaded for the web host’s server to the visitors computer.

In other words, the size of you webpages in kilobytes plus the size of each graphic or other type of file that is served to the users computer is the amount of transfer you are using. If your website will have a lot of graphics, movies, downloads, etc., make sure you choose a web-hosting plan that offers you a lot of bandwidth. The average website doesn’t need more than 2-5 gigabytes of transfer per month.

How much storage space do I need? The storage space is no different than your computer’s hard drive. If the web host offers 100 megabytes of storage space that is just like having a 100-megabyte hard drive. If your files are not more than 100 megabytes then that is plenty of storage. Most web hosting companies offer plenty of storage space, more than the average website will ever use.

The question, “What features should I look for and which tools do I need?” are ones that I can answer together.

What about the web host’s support policy. Do they offer 24/7 tech support? Do you think you will need 24/7 tech support? This is one area that is important for you to consider. The Internet is 24 hours per day. Your website is online 24 hours per day. So it is possible you might need 24/7 tech support.

How do you contact tech support there? Just email? Is there a phone number? Do they use support tickets? Do they have a chatroom or forum for tech support? How accessible your web hosting tech support is will determine how fast things get fixed when you have a problem. See if you can send in a tech support query before signing up. See how fast you get an email back or if they answer the phone when you call them.

Those three important issues, bandwidth, storage space, and tech support are not the only things you need to consider. Do they offer Cpanel or an easy-to-use control panel for managing your website? Can they show you a sample of the control panel before you sign up? If you choose a web host that does not have an easy-to-use control panel are you tech-savvy enough to get around in the root files?

How many databases can be created on your web hosting plan. How many do they allow? Do they offer instant-install or install-on-demand features like picture galleries, content management systems, forums, blogs, or other website enhancements?

These are all questions you need to ask before you sign up with any web hosting service. If they do not give you all that information on the automatic signup page, email them and ask them questions. Their response may be all you need to know about whether to choose them as your web hosting provider or not.

I hope this article has helped you to learn about some of the things you need to consider when choosing a web hosting service. Cheap is not always good. This is your online business. Treat it well and choose a web hosting serviee that makes things easier for you.

Web Hosting And Transfer Or Bandwidth

So, you have your domain name and you have designed a website or had a website built for you, now what. Well, of course you need hosting. A lot of people want to start a business online but are not aware of some of the basics like how people are able to view or visit your website.

What is web hosting? Right now, if you have already built your website, all of those files are on your computer. People who are surfing the web don’t have access to your computer, therefore cannot find your website. Advanced users know they can turn their computer into a server where people are actually coming to their computer to view their website, however, this is not recommended and certainly not recommended for someone who is not very advanced as a computer technician.

There are computers who are set up to be servers. These are called host computers as well to simplify things. You need to upload your website files to the hosting computer so they can make it available for others to view on the web. This is the service we call web hosting.

Will just any web host do? No. This is a common misunderstanding about web hosting. All web hosts are not created equal. There are many different levels of web hosting and many different plans and packages to consider. There are also many other things you have to consider when choosing a web hosting company. Let’s go over one of the most important issues when choosing a web hosting plan to help you understand better.

A lot depends on your individual needs. Will your website have a lot of graphics and images? Will it have movies? Music downloads? Software or other downloads? Or is it a very simple and compact website that is mostly text? Do you expect a lot of traffic to your website?

The reason for all those questions is something called “bandwidth” or “transfer”. The amount of storage space a web-hosting plan offers you is usually far less important than the amount of transfer or bandwidth the web host offers you.

Every time someone visits your webpage, every file included in that webpage is downloaded from your website to their computer. In other words, from the web host’s computer to the visitor’s computer. This includes each graphic or image on the page, every icon, even the html page itself is downloaded by a user just visiting your webpage. The size of each of those files being transferred to the visitors computer is the amount of “transfer” or “bandwidth” you are using.

Let’s say you get 100 visitors per day to your website. Let’s also say that your html page is around 15k and you have 5 images on that webpage that altogether are around 50k. That means each visitor to your website is using up 65k in bandwidth every time they visit that page. Let’s also say your average visitor opens 3 pages within your website and those pages are the same size as your main page. That means each visitor uses 195k minimum and that is if they don’t keep going back to your main page.

Multiply that 195k times the 100 visitors per day you get and you are using 19,500k or a little over 19 megabytes of transfer per day. Multiply that by 30 days and you get 585,000k or 585 megabytes of “transfer” or “bandwidth” used per month.

Now if your web hosting plan allows for more bandwidth than you think you will need, then you know you are okay there. However, make sure you know upfront what the cost of going over your allotted bandwidth is. Some webhosts charge a lot for every megabyte you use over the limit they set for you in the plan you chose. It’s a good idea to pick a webhosting plan that is just one step above the one you think you need to allow for growth. You might become very popular like a rock star overnight!