Download How to Choose a Web Host

HOW TO CHOOSE A WEB HOST
Prof. FAKUADE Gbenga
[email protected]
+234 8035381005, 8058069516
CHUKWUNONSO Franklyn,
[email protected]
+234 8038765452, 8052829700
Department of Information Technology,
Federal University of Technology, Yola
ABSTRACT
This paper presents some of the things you should look for when choosing a
web host. The criteria for choosing a free web host and a commercial web
hosting solution are slightly different although they do overlap. We have
adopted a two facet approach that caters for people who might be looking for
either of these types of hostingand have written these sections
independently. If you are only interested in one of these types, you can
simply skip to the appropriate section.
INTRODUCTION
The Internet is a virtual environment. Every single thing you see is nontangible. Your visitors cannot actually hold your product or service in their
hands. They cannot feel it, smell it, taste it or hear it. You can only work
within a limited environment; the Internet. So how do you sell a product or
service you offer if your visitors can only see it in this virtual environment?
You simply work with what you have and make it better than your
competitor's. Almost all web sites are stores or offices that have been placed
online. If you have a store or office, it needs to be "translated" into a virtual
environment. Unfortunately, this is where many companies or private owners
make their biggest mistake. It's the actual process of transferring this
location on to the Internet, to your web pages. Those who have offices may
not necessarily have an advantage as they might already have a head start
or something to start with. As stated earlier, the Internet is virtual meaning
your limits are basically your imagination.
This is where web design comes into place. Have you ever noticed how some
places you walk into, all the staff are nicely dressed with jacket and tie,
greeted with a smile and all their products are displayed very nicely. This is
not done by coincidence. There is of course a reason for this. This is where
the office has to, again, translate this service and quality to their website.
The great part about this is that your web pages have limitless possibilities.
You may be renting space for your office or store, but you of course have not
built your own building or office space. That is left up to the engineers and
building contractors. On the Internet it is much the same way. You rent
space from a web host provider and decide on a look or web design template
which will basically make up the interior of your store or office.
We will be concentrating on comparing free and paid website hosting options
for blogs. We know that any website including a blog needs a web hosting,
and it is important for you to make the first step right otherwise you might
suffer losing all your hard work later when you are thinking of taking the blog
to next level.
Basically, you should understand what free blog hosting and paid web
hosting is. Of course, anything that is free is always tempting, but you should
know that there are no free lunch under the sun, people give out something
in order to gain something out of it, it is no difference in any free blog
hosting offers you can find out there. In other words, you have to be crystal
clear of what you are giving out when you take that free offer and whether it
is worth giving that out.
Different free Blog hosting offer may have different tactics to tie you down to
them but generally these free blog hosting are trying to make use of your
content to generate advertising income, that means they will reserve a piece
of real estate on every of your blog web pages for their own.
You cannot use your own domain name for your blog in most free blog
hosting provider, and this can be a major problem for you if you are building
your own website branding, you are going to lose your website identity when
you want to transfer your blog elsewhere, or the free blog hosting decided to
exit the business.
Some popular free blog hosting are basically just a marketing tool for their
open source program, they don't put advertisement in your blog and they
don't allow you to put your own either, that means you are going to loose out
plenty of cash if your blog gets popular someday, you have sacrificed the
option to turn the traffic into cash.
Most of the free blog hosting uses a centralized blog program for easier
management, that means you will not have the control over the blog
program, for example adding plugins or extra modules of your choice to
make your blog stand out from others, you will not have the control over the
look and feel of your own blog either, although there are generally many
choices of themes and templates available for you to choose, you don't have
the option to use your own custom made theme.
If you are serious about creating a blog and looking forward to make some
money out of it, I would recommend to spend the little extra money to
register a domain name and get yourself a reliable web hosting provider, in a
paid web hosting environment, your content is your own property and you
are basically renting a web space from the web hosting provider, you can
terminate the account at anytime you wish and take all your content with
you to another web hosting provider. The web hosting provider is not going
to place any advertisement in your blog and you decide what you want to put
in your own web page (just be sure that you do not violate the Terms of the
web hosting account usage). You can hire a web designer to design your blog
or grep a free theme from the internet to install in your blog, you have full
control over what extra plugins to install in your blog.
You may be thinking...oh, well I am only testing out so free host shouldn't
matter. I would advise you not to take the risk, as you experiment further,
you tend to put up more work in to the free blog and you will not be able to
take these hard works with you if you are seeing some success with your
testing and wanted to move to a paid web hosting provider. You are basically
starting fresh again in a paid web hosting and that is going to take you
another round of testing and waiting.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF WEB HOSTING
The key responsibilities of a web hosting company are to provide server
space, web services and maintenance of servers which host websites owned
or controlled by individuals and companies. Most web hosting companies
offer shared hosting and dedicated hosting, which are explained in detail
below.
Shared Hosting
Another name for shared hosting is virtual hosting or mass hosting. It works
as follows: your content and applications are placed on a server which is
shared with other customers who also use that web host. The equipment and
server are owned and managed by the web host provider, with technicians
on hand to monitor and manage the servers.
Companies opt to go the shared hosting route because it is much cheaper
and it works well. In other words it’s affordable and efficient. It may be worth
your while to ask about shared hosting management tools which will allow
you to use shared hosting, but still get the benefits of a dedicated server
(described below), It is important to review the control panel which the
hosting company provides you. Although popular, shared hosting has its
restrictions. It limits you from using some scripting languages and
applications, although you are often allowed to customize and add features
such as a shopping cart or an online catalogue.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is a much more sophisticated type of web hosting. This
type of hosting allows you to rent an entire server yourself and have access
to all its resources to host one or more websites. With dedicated hosting
there is no transfer of assets or personnel to the web host. Either you or your
web host owns the equipment. This is decided on a number of factors,
differing from company to company. The web host typically does not take
responsibility for anything other than the hosting operations. Business
processes, strategic direction and debugging applications, for example, have
to be managed by the customer.
Dedicated hosting is specialized and the customer gets dedicated hosting
benefits such as secure, high quality physical infrastructure and high speed
internet connectivity. Hosting packages are often customized to fit the needs
of the customer with regards to bandwidth, memory and storage space
needed. Because you “own” an entire server and are not sharing with
another company, it allows for CPU-intensive applications to operate
smoothly and prevents your website performance from being disrupted by
others. This makes a dedicated hosting plan the ideal package for companies
with larger, high-traffic websites and gives them total control over the
hosting environment.
Root Server hosting
Another name for Root Server hosting is Semi-managed hosting. This is a
form of dedicated hosting which allows you control over your server by
access to the root, while providing various benefits, such as reliable
infrastructure, security and maintenance of hardware. Root Server hosting
gives redundant (uninterrupted) internet connectivity and flexibility for you
to choose operations systems and hardware specifications most suitable for
your needs.
Since a Root Server is a semi managed server, the hosting provider will
manage the installation and hardware, but you, the client, manage all other
aspects of it, including backups and software upgrades. As the client you will
also have root access or administrator access, enabling you to do virtually
anything on that server.
A Root Server is a very versatile server, where you can do whatever you
wish, including hosting your own web server or mail server. Root Server
hosting is intended for people who need more flexibility and customization
than a managed Dedicated server.
Reseller Hosting
This type of hosting is ideal for entrepreneurs and businesses who wish to
host on behalf of their own customers. Reselling web hosting services means
that you can take out a contract with a web hosting provider and then sell
their services on under your own brand. Web hosting companies do this
because they are able to sell more of their dedicated hosting space this way.
The customer pays a set fee for the use of services from the web host, which
they can then resell under their own brand. Different hosting companies offer
different contracts and agreements.
CHOOSING A FREE WEB HOST
Advertising
Most free web hosts impose advertising on your website. This is done to
cover the costs of providing your site the free web space and associated
services. Some hosts require you to place a banner on your pages, others
display a window that pops up every time a page on your site loads, while
still others impose an advertising frame on your site. There is really no hard
and fast rule which is to be preferred: some people hate a pop-up window,
other webmasters dislike having to stuff banner codes onto their pages, and
many people cannot stand an advertising frame (which may cause problems
when you submit your website to search engines). Whichever method is
used, check that you're comfortable with the method.
Note that free web hosts without forced advertisements aren't necessarily
good news. Without a viable means to recover the costs of running their
server, many of them close with alarming frequency.
Amount of web space
Does it have enough space for your needs? If you envisage that you will
expand your site eventually, you might want to cater for future expansion.
Most sites use less than 5MB of web space. Indeed, at one time, one of my
other web sites, thefreecountry.com, used less than 5MB of space although it
had about 150 pages on the site. Your needs will vary, depending on how
many pictures your pages use, whether you need sound files, video clips, etc.
FTP access
Some free hosting providers only allow you to design your page with their
online builder. While this is useful for beginners, do you have the option to
expand later when you become experienced and their online page builder
does not have the facility you need? FTP access, or at the very least, the
ability to upload your pages by email or browser, is needed. Personally, I feel
FTP access is mandatory, except for the most trivial site.
File type and size limitations
Watch out for these. Some free hosts impose a maximum size on each of the
files you upload (including one with a low of 200KB). Other sites restrict the
file types you can upload to HTML and GIF/JPG files. If your needs are
different, eg, if you want to distribute your own programs on your pages, you
will have to look elsewhere.
Reliability and speed of access
This is extremely important. A site that is frequently down will lose a lot of
visitors. If someone finds your site on the search engine, and he tries to
access it but find that it is down, he'll simply go down the list to find another
site. Slow access is also very frustrating for visitors (and for you too, when
you upload your site). How do you know if a host is reliable or fast? If you
can't get feedback from anyone, one way is to try it out yourself over a
period of time, both during peak as well as non-peak hours. After all, it is
free, so you can always experiment with it.
CGI-BIN access / PHP
This is not particularly crucial nowadays for a free web host, since there are
so many free CGI hosting services available that provide counters, search
engines, forms, polls, mailing lists, etc, without requiring you to dabble with
Perl or PHP scripts.
However if you really want to do it yourself, with the minimum of advertising
banners from these free providers, you will need either PHP or CGI-BIN
access. Note that it is not enough to know they provide PHP or CGI-BIN
access: you need to know the kind of environment your scripts run under: is
it so restrictive that they are of no earthly use? For PHP scripts, does your
web host allow you to use the mail() function? For Perl CGI scripts, do you
have access to sendmail or its work alike?
Bandwidth allotment
Nowadays, many free web hosts impose a limit on the amount of traffic your
website can use per day and per month. This means that if the pages (and
graphic images) on your site is loaded by visitors beyond a certain number of
times per day (or per month), the web host will disable your web site (or
perhaps send you a bill). It is difficult to recommend a specific minimum
amount of bandwidth, since it depends on how you design your site, your
target audience, and the number of visitors you're able to attract to your
site. In general, 100MB traffic per month is too little for anything other than
your personal home page and 1-3GB traffic per month is usually adequate for
a simple site just starting out. Your mileage, however, will vary.
CHOOSING A COMMERCIAL WEB HOST
Reliability and speed of access
Not only should the web host be reliable and fast, it should guarantee its
uptime (the time when it is functional). Look for a minimum uptime of 99%.
In fact, even 99% is actually too low - it really should be 99.5% or higher.
The host should provide some sort of refund (eg prorated refund or discount)
if it falls below that figure. Note though that guarantees are often hard to
enforce from your end - the host usually requires all sorts of documentation.
However, without that guarantee, the web host will have little incentive to
ensure that its servers are running all the time.
Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)
Data transfer (sometimes loosely referred to as "traffic" or "bandwidth") is
the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse
your site.
Don't believe any commercial web host that advertises "unlimited
bandwidth". The host has to pay for the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot
of it, they will not silently bear your costs. Many high bandwidth websites
have found this out the hard way when they suddenly receive an exhorbitant
bill for having "exceeded" the "unlimited bandwidth". Always look for details
on how much traffic the package allows. I personally always stay clear of any
host that advertises "unlimited transfer", even if the exact amount is
specified somewhere else (sometimes buried in their policy statements).
Usually you will find that they redefine "unlimited" to be limited in some way.
In addition, while bandwidth provided is something you should always check,
do not be unduly swayed by promises of incredibly huge amounts of
bandwidth. Chances are that your website will never be able to use that
amount because it will hit other limits, namely resource limits.
To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website,
most new sites that are not software archives or the like use less than 3 GB
of bandwidth per month. Your traffic requirements will grow over time, as
your site becomes more well-known (and well-linked), so you will need to
also check their policy for overages: is there a published charge per GB over
the allowed bandwidth? Is the charge made according to actual usage or are
you expected to pre-pay for a potential overage? It is better not to go for
hosts that expect you to prepay for overages, since it is very hard to forsee
when your site will exceed its bandwidth and by how much.
Disk space
For the same reason as bandwidth, watch out also for those "unlimited disk
space" schemes. Most sites need less than 10 MB of web space, so even if
you are provided with a host that tempts you with 200 MB or 500 MB (or
"unlimited space"), be aware that you are unlikely to use that space, so don't
let the 500 MB space be too big a factor in your consideration when
comparing with other web hosts. The hosting company is also aware of that,
which is why they feel free to offer you that as a means of enticing you to
host there. As a rough gauge, thefreecountry.com, which had about 150
pages when this article was first written, used less than 5 MB for its pages
and associated files.
Technical support
Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (often
abbreviated 24/7), all year around? Note that I will not accept a host which
does not have staff working on weekends or public holidays. You will be
surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times.
Incidentally, just because a host advertises that it has 24/7 support does not
necessarily mean that it really has that kind of support. Test them out by
emailing at midnight and on Saturday nights, Sunday mornings, etc. Check
out how long they take to respond. Besides speed of responses, check to see
if they are technically competent. You wouldn't want to sign up for a host
that is run by a bunch of salesmen who only know how to sell and not fix
problems.
FTP, PHP, Perl CGI-BIN access, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, crontabs
If you are paying for a site, you really should make sure you have all of
these. Note that some commercial hosts do not allow you to install PHP or
CGI scripts without their approval. This is not desirable since it means that
you have to wait for them before you can implement a feature on your site.
".htaccess" is needed if you are to customise your error pages (pages that
display when, say, a user requests for a non-existent page on your site) or to
protect your site in various ways (such as to prevent bandwidth theft and
hotlinking, etc). Telnet or SSH access is useful for certain things, including
testing CGI scripts, maintaining databases, etc. Cron jobs may be needed for
programs that you need to be run periodically (eg once a day). Check to see
if these facilities are provided.
SSL (secure server), MySQL, Shopping Cart
If you are planning on doing any sort of business through your website, you
might want to look out to see if the host provides these facilities. These
facilities normally involve a higher priced package or additional charges. The
main thing is to check to see if they are available at all before you commit to
the host. You will definitely need SSL if you plan to collect credit card
information on your site.
Email, Auto Responders, POP3, Mail Forwarding
If you have your own site, you would probably want to have email addresses
at your own domain, like [email protected], etc. Does the host provide
this with the package? Does it allow you to have a catch-all email account
that allows [email protected] to wind up being routed 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?
Control Panel
This is called various names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow
you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and
at the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and
manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account. I
would not go for a host where I have to go through their technical support
each time I want to change a password or add/delete an email account. Such
chores are common maintenance chores that every webmaster performs
time and time again, and it would be a great hassle if you had to wait for
their technical support to make the changes for you.
Multiple Domain Hosting and Subdomains
For those who 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 the amount extra that they charge for this (whether it is a one-time
or monthly charge, etc).
Server
Is the type of operating system and server important? Whether you think so
or not on the theoretical level, there are a few practical reasons for looking
out for the type of server.
In general, if you want to use things like ASP, you have no choice but to look
for a Windows NT/2000/XP machine for your server.
Otherwise my preference is to sign up for accounts using the often cheaper,
more stable and feature-laden Unix systems running the Apache server. In
fact, if dynamically generated pages that can access databases (etc) is what
you want, you can always use the more portable (and popular) PHP instead
of tying yourself down to ASP. Another reason to prefer Unix-based web
hosts (which include web hosts using systems like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD,
Solaris, etc) using the Apache web server is that these servers allow you to
configure a lot of facilities that you typically need on your site (error pages,
protecting your images, blocking email harvesters, blocking IP addresses,
etc) without having to ask your web host to implement them.
Price
I was actually hesitant to list this, but I guess it's futile not to. However, I
would caution that while price is always a factor, you should realize that you
often get what you pay for, although it's not necessarily true that the most
expensive hosts are the best.
Monthly/Quarterly/Annual Payment Plans
Most web hosts allow you to select an annual payment plan that gives you a
cheaper rate than if you were to pay monthly. My current personal
preference is to pay monthly with all new web hosts until I'm assured of their
reliability and honesty. Paying monthly allows me to switch web hosts quickly
when I find that the current host does not meet my requirements: this way,
I'm not tied down to a bad web host because I have prepaid for an entire
year. I do this even if the new web host guarantees that they will refund the
balance if I'm dissatisfied, since at the point I sign up, I have no assurance
that they will honour their guarantee. Later (usually after many months or
even more than a year), when I'm satisfied with the host, I often change
payment plans to the discounted annual plans.
Resellers?
Not all hosting companies own or lease their own web servers. Some of them
are actually resellers for some other hosting company. The disadvantage of
using a reseller is the possibility that you are dealing with people who don't
know much about the system they are selling and who take longer to help
you (they have to transmit your technical support request to the actual
hosting company for it to be acted upon). However, this also depends on
both the reseller and the underlying hosting company. It is thus wise not to
rule out all resellers; there are a number of reliable and fast ones who are
actually quite good and cheap. In fact, a number of resellers sell the same
packages cheaper than their original hosting company. If you find out that a
particular company is a reseller, you will need to investigate both the
reseller and the real hosting company.
International
If you don't stay in the USA, you have the option of hosting your site with
some local provider. The advantage here is the ease of dealing with them
(they are after all easily accessible by phone call or a visit), your familiarity
with the local laws and easy recourse to those laws should it be necessary. It
should be your choice if your target audience is local (eg a local fast food
delivery service). On the other hand, hosting it in USA has the advantage of
faster access for what is probably the largest number of your overseas
visitors (particularly if you have an English-speaking audience). You also
have a large number of hosting companies to choose from, and as a result,
cheaper prices too.
Others' Reviews
You should make it a point to check out what others have to say about the
web host. Some of the places you can do this include:
o
o
o
The newsgroup news:alt.www.webmaster. As you should always
do when reading reviews (of anything), read the reviews posted
here with a pinch of salt. Some glowing reviews may come from
people working for the web host itself, disguised as multiple
satisfied customers. Likewise, negative reviews of a particular host
can sometimes come from unscrupulous competitors of that host.
thesitewizard.com's review, "Which Web Host Would You
Recommend?
(FAQ)",
found
at
http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/webhosting.shtml
Although not often, I sometimes make comments about a
particular web host in my Budget Web Hosts page on
thefreecountry.com as well.
Don't skip this step, or you might find yourself being suckered by a host that
everyone else is steering clear of.
CONCLUSION
In general, there are no "perfect" web hosting companies around. Even when
one is prepared to pay a huge price for hosting needs, it does not guarantee
that the host is any good. This is an interesting industry where a high price
does not necessarily yield quality hosting and support. On the other hand,
one thing you can probably be sure of is that the much cheaper the price, the
less the quality of service and vice versa.
Thus, this paper has attempted to help you in settling for a trade-off between
price, reliability and features that you're willing to live with.
REFERENCES
Berners-Lee, T., (1996): “The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future,”
URL http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html, last accessed
March 5, 2007.
Conrad L. and C. Rubin (1996): Guerrilla Marketing Online Attack. Houghton
Mifflin Company, New York.
Conrad L. and C. Rubin (1995): Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet. Judy
Piatkus Publishers, London.
Paul Hoffman (1996): The Internet, the Official Companion to the PBS
Special, “The Internet Show.” IDG Books, Foster City.
Paul Hoffman (1996): Netscape and the World Wide Web for Dummies 2nd
Edition. IDG Books, Foster City.