Selecting Your Web Host: Part 3

Once you have reassured yourself about the reliability and the price of your webhost, check out the FEATURES offered:

1. WEBSPACE

As a minimum, a starting package should have at least 100 MB. This would be sufficient for most websites, except if you plan to have lots of images.

2. BANDWIDTH

Unless you expect to receive millions of visitors each month, 10 GB will be sufficient. What is more important is to be able to upgrade whenever you need to. Avoid companies that will automatically shut down your website if you exceed the allocated bandwidth. If you are not sure about your bandwidth needs, choose a package with 100 GB allocation.

3. CONTROL PANEL

Make sure that you will receive your own control panel. If there is no demo, ask for one at the help desk. The most popular panels are cPanel and Plesk. Some hosting providers offer custom-made panels, which should be avoided in most cases.

4. HELP DESK

I have already mentioned it, but make sure that there is a help desk. Test it by opening help tickets with simple queries. Note a response time.

5. E-MAIL

If you decide to use your hosting service also for email, make sure that you will have both POP and SMTP access. You will need both POP and SMTP to access your mailbox with your email client, e.g. Thunderbird or Outlook. Make sure that the allocated disk space is reasonable, e.g. as a minimum of 100 MB per mailbox.

6. WEBMAIL

A decent webmail service should be included.

7. FTP ACCESS

Usually it is included as a standard. You will need it for uploading your website.

8. DATABASE TOOLS

If you plan to install PHP-based scripts, make sure that your hosting provider will be able to support them.

9. SITE STATISTICS

This is also usually included in all packages. Avoid additional payments for advanced reporting features. Normally, everything should be included in your monthly fee.

Selecting Your Web Host: Part 2

... and now another important tip: KEEP YOUR COSTS DOWN...

It´s very easy to overpay for your hosting. The surest way to overpay is by:

1. Choosing a wrong company

There are hundreds and more likely of thousands of hosting companies that go out of business every year. A bad choice means frequent switching, which in turn implies high costs every time you have to move your site.

2. Ignoring free options

There are some good free services available from large internet companies that are likely to stay in business for many years to come. This blog is hosted at blogger.com - a good company with a great service. Absolutely free.

3. Not using free picture galleries

Pictures tend to eat up your disk space very fast. That´s ahy you should consider using such free services as Kodak EasyShare Gallery and Flikr, a Yahoo company. At any time you can upgrade. The downside is that usually you cannot use your custom domain name with such services.

4. Signing-up for long-term contracts

The best hosting contract is a one month contract, unless you are 100% certain about the reliability of your hosting service provider. Signing-up for anything beyond one year would reduce your flexibility to switch.

5. Following "expert" advice

Biased "experts", as discussed in my earlier post, can mislead you by failing to disclose their referral arrangements with hosting companies. Do your own research and double check the claims made by such experts.

Selecting Your Web Host: Part 1

A few tips for selecting a good hosting company...

PART 1: AVAILABILITY

What is the most important criteria for selecting your hosting service? Is it the price, the disk space, or is it the bandwidth? Probably neither. What matters in hosting is the availability of a website throughout the day.

A popular measure of availability is the uptime guarantee, such as a "three nines", i.e. 99.9% uptime guarantee. How good is it? "Three nines" translates into about 10 minutes of downtime per week or about 43 minutes of dowtime per month. Obviously it´s not good enough for many professional websites.

What is the next best? Well, it´s "four nines", i.e. 99.99%, which translates into 1 minute of downtime per week or just over 4 minutes per month. Even better to is to have a "five nines" guarantee, i.e. 99.999% of uptime. This would translate into a virtually uninterupted service with only 6 seconds of dowtime per week or less than half a minute of downtime per month.

When reviewing an uptime guarantee, check whether maintenance is included. Most often it´s excluded from a guarantee, which means that all planned downtime would not count as an outage.

In most cases, you might have to learn about the reliability of your hosting provider the hard way - i.e. by experiencing the downtime. Are there any tools to help you monitor the situation? Yes. I recommend MONTASTIC. It´s a free tool and very easy to use. Whenever your site is down, it will send you a message. After a short while, you will have a good idea about the actual availability of your website.

I am pasting below the Green Page from Montastic. It provides a large degree of psychological comfort for those monitoring a few websites at a time.

Another tip is to avoid long-term contracts with hosting providers. The ideal option is to have a monthly (or a quarterly) billing cycle. If you decide to switch, at least your financial costs will be limited.