Laying the Foundations of a Good Website - Good Hosting
Before you can even get started on building a shiny new website you need to think about web hosting. Web hosting is basically renting a small part of a web server either on a monthly or yearly basis. You can not launch a website without somewhere to store it!
There are literally thousands of web hosting providers out there but from experience I can assure you that they are not all created equally. There are a number of factors you need to consider when looking for a hosting provider which I will go in to further in this article.
Reliability
Reliability is probably the most important factor when looking to buy web hosting. If your website is not available even for short periods of time you will lose visitors and they will not come back! This is even more important when you rely on repeat custom as an otherwise satisfied customer will stop using your services if they can not access your website.
The figure that most hosting companies rely on when touting their reliability is uptime. This is the percentage of time that the server is available to serve up web pages. A good quality website hosting supplier would be expected to achieve a 99.99% uptime, however by paying a premium you can find hosting providers who offer 99.999% uptime.
If reliability key to your business you should avoid cheap hosting deals and offers from providers that do not have an established track record as many budget web hosting packages have very poor reliability. In any case you should never settle for a company that offers less than 99.5% uptime. If the uptime figure is not quoted assume it is pretty bad, as any company who takes reliability seriously will make a big thing of promoting it.
A word of caution should also be mentioned here. Beware the hosting providers who quote “network uptime” rather than “server uptime”. Network uptime is the percentage of time all servers in the company have connectivity to the Internet. Network uptime should always be 100% as most hosting providers will have multiple redundant connections to the Internet to provide a backup should a main connection fail.
Disk Space
This is the amount of space on your hosting package available for you to store your files. You should already have a rough idea how big your website is going to be especially if you have been testing your website on a local machine before uploading it to the Internet.
Unless you are going to be storing a large amount of images, videos or MP3s a typical website will not usually need more than about 100 Megabytes of disk space. If you plan to build a large database driven website with potentially thousands of pages you might want to increase this figure.
Many large hosting providers will offer huge amounts of disk space to their customers, for what seems to be a very low monthly price. These companies rely on an assumption that most users on their servers will never use all the space they are allocated. For example a server may have a 500 Gigabyte hard drive and 100 users share the drive. Each user is allowed to use up to 100 Gigabytes of space but most use just a few hundred Megabytes. So what happens when everyone wants to use their full allowance? This is known as over-selling and can be a dangerous practice that we will look in to later.
Data Transfer / Bandwidth
As well as allocating you a fixed amount of disk space most hosting companies will apply a data transfer limit sometimes referred to as bandwidth. The data transfer limit is the amount of data that can be uploaded and downloaded from your website in a month.
If your website is quite small and has few pictures you can usually expect your bandwidth to be a few hundred Megabytes each month, but bigger sites with large number of pictures or streaming video may use several Gigabytes of data transfer.
The busier your site is the more bandwidth it will require, so if you are running a community forum for example try to keep the size of web pages to a minimum as they will be download many times each month. Another thing to look out for is when people on other websites directly to your files, which is known as hot-linking. When a file is hot-linked and another website uses your file the bandwidth comes out of your allowance. More on this at a later date.
Email Addresses
When considering email requirements for your website there are a few things you might want to check. The most obvious one is how many email address inboxs are you are allowed. You may also be interested in the number of email forwarders you can have, as by using email forwarders you can give the impression of many email accounts and route them all back to one inbox.
Some web hosting packages include advanced email features such as auto-responders. An auto-responder is a special email address that can return a predetermined email when it receives email to it. An example where this may be useful is if you were offering a free download to customers when they send you an email. You could get the email responder to send them back the download link without having to do it manually yourself.
Another advanced email feature is email announcement lists or discussion lists. An announcement list is where visitors can sign up for a newsletter for example. Once all the members have signed up to your email list you can send them all a message from one place, usually an online form provided by your web hosting provider. A discussion list is very similar to an announcement list except that the individual members on the list can send messages to the group. This can be good when working in teams or discussing a common interest.