Guide to a good Web-Hosting
A website (over the Internet) is growingly becoming important for everybody, whether it is a business or individual or family. It is no longer optional if you want your entity to be known. So everybody wants a website nowadays. With this thing in mind, let’s start from the basic up about what one should look into when deciding upon taking a web hosting from a certain web hosting company.
* Start small and start free! Search for different companies and find the ones which are free. Yes, there are lot of them around, but their functionality is very limited. It gives a feel to the novice about how to setup the website with a host without risking any money, but it’s not much anyway nowadays, maybe 10 bucks per month. Once you get a feel of what is provided and what not and what to look for in a hosting service, then you can go for paid hosting.
* Avoid web-hosting resellers, but it is usually tough to figure out; with a little research you can make out whether it’s a reseller or not. They may be there to make short-term profits and may not survive for a longer time when the competition really grows. I am not saying that they are bad: when you plan for a website you should plan to keep it for long time like 5 years or more. A reseller may not be able to stay that long because most of them are in their transition (experimentation) phase and you don’t want to be the victim!
* Down-time is very very important, the lesser the better. You wouldn’t want your site to be down for even a few minutes. Some web hosting companies have a large down time, meaning for lot of times your website will not be accessible, it’ll show ‘Page Not Found’. If down-time is less than 0.01%, then you’re alright. Hardly does anybody give 0% downtime, there are always some problems with the hardware somewhere sometimes.
* Ask for how much one-time fee (setup fee) and monthly (recurring) amount they are charging. There should be no contract for a length of time, whatsoever. The company should also offer at least 1 month money-back guarantee.
* If monthly fee is around 10 bucks, then you should get decent things with your hosting. Following are some of the things you should investigate into:
> How many add-on domains you can host
> How many sub-domains you can create
> Do they provide domain forwarding
> How many databases you can have
> How much is the hard-disk space
> How much monthly band-width is being provided
> How many email addresses for the main domain and each add-on domain you can have
> How many domains you can park
> What scripts and languages are supported: PHP, PERL, Python, JSP, Ruby, etc.
> Do they provide shell support, i.e. can you login to some kind of Unix-shell and work command line (not a necessity though)
> How much ftp (file transfer band-width) they are providing
> Can you modify the configuration for your server (say Apache’s .htaccess)
> Can you modify your programming config file, say php.ini file for PHP
> Can you install external programming modules, say for PERL
> Will you be able to place streaming audio and video on your site
> Do they take a backup of the site(s) and database(s) and what is the backup frequency.
* Some web hosting providers try to make their list really long, by listing open source softwares like wiki, shopping cart, fantastico, content-management system, etc. Those are really not important. You can always install them on your own. What your are looking for is a robust web-hosting and not a fancy software(s) provider.
* Once you decide about the hosting company. Try them for a month. If you don’t like, simply switch to another best. It is a good experience to try different companies, giving yourself an exposure of what different companies have to offer.
* Once you settle down to a company permanently, there are some things you should do:
> Look into all the default config options in .htaccess file (if Apache server). This is the target of hackers, who know the default config from a particular web-hosting company and they tend to target those sites which are hosted there. So, don’t take the default settings as it is, make sure you see that your site is safe and don’t rely on default settings.
> Your site should not have file indexes. For example, if I go to <yoursite>.com/images/, it should not list all the images/files in that directory, rather it should show something like ‘Page Not Exists’ kind of thing or your friendly error message page.
> Take a regular backup of your site and database, frequency depends upon how important your site’s content is for you. Do not rely on the hosting company. They usually take the backup of the whole hard-disk, which will have many websites hosted. If you lose your site content somehow (hard-disk crash, let’s say) it will be difficult for them to restore your site only, it’ll take them time to troubleshoot and they will charge you for that.
> Check your site logs regularly, for errors or anything which is not desirable.
> Enable site stats and study them. It will give you an idea about who is coming to your site.
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I recently started using hostgator, and found these coupons:
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I know the coupon ‘1centhosting’ works good, but I’m sure the others do as well.
Best wishes.