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Choosing a Good Web Hosting Company for your Website
Determining the best web hosting company for you is critical to your web site's success. Whether it is for business, e-commerce, a fan site or just a hobby, the host you choose plays a large factor on how well you’ll fare in the online world. In such a flooded market with so many different hosting companies and packages out there, how do you know who to trust with your site? You want a reliable company that will make sure your site is always available, you want a support department that actually exists and can help you quickly, but of course it needs to be affordable and fit into your budget, especially if your web site isn’t intended to generate any income.
Knowing your requirements is the first step in finding the best host for you
Determine your budget. Determine your hosting specifications, such as storage, band width, number of email accounts required, type of admin interface needed etc. Do not be fooled by marketing gimmicks. Look for a host that is upfront about your limits
Okay so we got your requirements, your budget and what hosts to look out for. Now it’s time to actually find your potential hosting company. You may have a web companies in mind, which is great. If not ask around with friends and family to see if they can recommend anyone or someone to avoid. Do a Google or yahoo search if you are up to it, you will find hundreds of thousands of potential web hosts.
Once you have a list of web hosts you are interested in, it’s time to research them and evaluate them. First make sure they offer a package that meets your budget. Then contact the hosting company, email the sales department or submit a sales ticket in their customer support panels this should be easy to find. Let them know you are a potential client, and you are interested in their services. Ask them any questions that may be on your mind, or to clarify what exactly their hosting packages include, ask about their uptime, response time to support tickets and so on. If all else fails simply ask them that if you out-grew your plan, if you could easily upgrade to a bigger one. Generally the answer should be yes, but what you are actually testing here is their response time. You want to see how long it takes for a host to respond to your inquiry. This is a good test to tell how fast their support could be.
Next do a Google search on them. Check out their guarantees, many hosting companies offer a 15, 30 or even 45 day satisfaction guarantee. Look for additional or bonus features. See whether or not the company backups your website.
If you follow these steps, use a little common sense and understand that no one can offer you unlimited anything, especially for a few bucks a month, you are well on your way to finding a good, solid host that will serve you well for years to come.
By:
Cameron Coish
Types of Web Hosting
Free web hosting service: offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements, and often limited when compared to paid hosting.
Shared web hosting service: one's website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite extensive. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.
Reseller web hosting: allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a provider. Resellers' accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a collocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider's shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves.
Virtual Dedicated Server: also known as a Virtual Private Server (VPS), divides server resources into virtual servers, where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. VPS will often be allocated resources based on a one server to many VPSs relationship, however virtualisation may be done for a number of reasons, including the ability to move a VPS container between servers. The users may have root access to their own virtual space. Customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server.
Dedicated hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server and gains full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, the user typically does not own the server. Another type of Dedicated hosting is Self-Managed or Unmanaged. This is usually the least expensive for Dedicated plans. The user has full administrative access to the box, which means the client is responsible for the security and maintenance of his own dedicated box.
Managed hosting service: the user gets his or her own Web server but is not allowed full control over it (root access for Linux/administrator access for Windows); however, they are allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server or potentially create configuration problems. The user typically does not own the server. The server is leased to the client.
Colocation web hosting service: similar to the dedicated web hosting service, but the user owns the colo server; the hosting company provides physical space that the server takes up and takes care of the server. This is the most powerful and expensive type of the web hosting service. In most cases, the colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their client's machine, providing only the electrical, Internet access, and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for colo, the client would have his own administrator visit the data center on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.
Cloud Hosting: is a new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. Removing single-point of failures and allowing customers to pay for only what they use versus what they could use.
Clustered hosting: having multiple servers hosting the same content for better resource utilization. Clustered Servers are a perfect solution for high availability dedicated hosting, or creating a scalable web hosting solution. A cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability.
Grid hosting: this form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Home server: usually a single machine placed in a private residence can be used to host one or more web sites from a usually consumer-grade broadband connection. These can be purpose-built machines or more commonly old PCs. Some ISPs actively attempt to block home servers by disallowing incoming requests to TCP port 80 of the user's connection and by refusing to provide static IP addresses. A common way to attain a reliable DNS hostname is by creating an account with a dynamic DNS service. A dynamic DNS service will automatically change the IP address that a URL points to when the IP address changes.
Source:
Wikipedia
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