Hosting Your Site

There are hundreds or thousands of companies providing web hosting services. It takes some time and effort to find the perfect plan for your needs, but you are rewarded with savings and better service quality.

Most hosting companies have more than one hosting plan available, and you can usually upgrade to bigger one later. Note that downgrading may not be an option. The hosting plans are divided into virtual hosting and dedicated hosting.

Virtual Hosting

The most common solution for websites is virtual hosting, where several sites are hosted in a single server. The server responds with different content to different domain names and gives impression of single server serving single site. Virtual hosting is the cheapest solution and it is suitable for small to medium scale sites.

Dedicated Hosting

If virtual hosting does not provide enough resources or the site requires special services, dedicated hosting can be an answer. The site is hosted on a single server that resided in the hosting company premises, sharing the network connection with other servers.

Things to Consider

The hosting advertising is concentrated on the amount of disk space and number of e-mail boxes, but there are a lot of important features to consider when selecting a good host.

Bandwidth

The more you have visitors, the more you consume bandwidth. And when you have gone on top of the limit, you will be charged. And usually quite heavily. Avoid hosting plans that have low bandwidth limit (below 5 gigabytes a month) or have high cost for extra gigabytes. If you hit the limit every month, consider upgrading to the next plan.

Backups

When something hits the fan, you want to get your data back on-line as soon as possible. And it could be you that screws up. Thus good backup practices are essential. If there are no daily backups or incremental backups with a weekly full backup, do not take your chances with that hosting plan. Remember to check the cost of extra restoration. Note: Even if you are satisfied with the backup procedures of the hosting company, keep a recent copy of your website always on your local disk, as you newer know when the hosting company goes bankcrupt or you need to move your website to somewhere else.

Support

There might be need from time to time to get answers to your technical problems. A good hosting plan has several ways to get support. Do not sign a plan that does not have an interactive support, a chat or a phone number. The support has to be 24×7.

Secure Access

To protect your assets, select a hosting plan that provides you a secure access to your data. Do not use FTP as it is unsecure by nature, but ask for SSH access and use SCP or SFTP. Check also that the control panel and web e-mail systems have SSL support.

Databases

If you are doing any on-line business, you need a database. The basic database provided in hosting plans is MySQL and it is usually enough for basic needs. You can cope with one database, but the more the better. Just to remember check if there is some limitations on the database size.

Scripting

Scripts have to be used, if you want to have any interactive or dynamic services available on your website. The most common choice for scripting nowadays is PHP, and another popular language is Perl. Make sure that the hosting plan provides at least these two and ability to run cgi-binaries. If you are accustomed to Windows, ASP can be good choice instead of these. Java is quite rare and if you do not have direct need, it is not worth investing extra.

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