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.

Domain Management

You might be looking just to host one website at the moment, in which case this section might not be relevant to you. Some web hosting companies only allow you to host one website domain on each account. This is fine if you do not need to expand in the future but if you plan to build more websites in the future it might be worth considering a package that allows multiple domains.

Types of Hosting

The type of hosting you will be looking at will probably be defined by a combination of the factors mentioned above and the price. Web hosting varies in price from a few dollars a month up to several hundred depending on the complexity of the package you require. The most common types of web hosting packages running from cheapest to most expensive are shared hosting, clustered shared hosting, virtual private server, dedicated private server and clustered dedicated servers.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is where several accounts are placed on one web server. The number of accounts on a server varies according to the hosting provider and the specification of the servers used but most cases you will be sharing with a few hundred other users.

All accounts on a shared server have to share the same physical server resources such as processor time and RAM. This can cause problems when you are sharing the same server as a website that is particularly processor or RAM intensive as it is not possible to equally distributed server resources in a shared hosting solution.

If all you require is a basic web hosting solution and you do not plan to run a particularly intensive or busy website then shared hosting is probably a well suited and affordable solution. If however you plan to expand your website, or wish to run a database driven dynamic website then you might want to consider a more advanced solution.

Clustered Shared Hosting

A step up from shared hosting is clustered hosting. Instead of your files being stored on one web server which is shared between all users your files are usually stored on a network storage device. This storage device is shared between several web server who each have access to all of your files.

Each one of these servers is capable of delivering your web pages to the end user, so in effect you have the equivalent resources of several shared servers. The advantage of a clustered environment is that any one website that is particularly resource heavy will not hugely affect it’s neighbours on the same cluster, as there are several servers doling out the content.

As requests for your web pages come in they are fed through a load balancer and sent to the server which is the least busy. In a real world situation a clustered server system can be a lot faster than a shared setup. The other advantage of a cluster is fault tolerance and uptime, because if one server fails the load balancer will start distributing website traffic to the remaining servers.

Virtual Private Servers

In a virtual server setup the resources of the web server are equally distributed between all the users on the system. The number of users on a virtual private server are much lower than a shared system and vary between 30 and 60 users.

Each user on a virtual private server runs their own version of the web server operating system. They also have a dedicated amount of RAM allotted to them and sometimes have extra RAM that is “burstable” when the user’s account requires it. CPU power is divided between all users equally, usually on a round-robin basis.

A virtual private server removes the problems of bad neighbours, as each website account on the system is run completely separately from each other. As each of the virtual accounts is fully customisable it is possible to run applications on a virtual server that would not normally be available in a shared environment. This might include applications such as Ruby on Rails, or Apache Tomcat.

Dedicated Private Servers

On a dedicated private server you have exclusive use of the web server you have rented. Dedicated hosting is often much more expensive than shared or virtual private web hosting packages however you do have complete control over what runs on the system.

Dedicated servers are best suited to extremely busy or intensive websites such as media streaming websites. The specifications for processor and RAM configurations on a dedicated server are often much lower than a shared package or virtual server package however you will have full use of these resources.

A dedicated server setup is capable of serving a few hundred websites from one machine, or a lower number of website with a database installed as well. When considering a dedicated server you should think about the times of the day when your websites are most active. If all your websites are most active at around the same part of the day then you may find that a dedicated server gets slow at that time of day and remains relatively inactive for the rest of the day.

Clustered Private Servers

More advanced setups than those previously mentioned remain in the realm of large businesses and are rarely used outside of worldwide corporations unless you have a very demanding web application. Clustering web servers together is similar in concept the clustered shared hosting but instead of sharing the server resources you have complete control over each machine.

There are number of web hosting companies that specialise in large and complex hosting requirements. When looking at a clustered private server setup you will normally need to consider options such a dedicated firewall, a load balancing server, a number of application servers and servers for data storage and databases.

Private server clusters are usually offered as managed hosting packages, which means that someone at the hosting company is on hand to look after your cluster of servers. This is particularly good if something goes wrong as there will usually be someone on hand 24 hours a day.

A Quick Summary

When looking for hosting you need to take in to account your future requirements as well as your current ones. As a general guide if you have one or two low volume websites and do not rely on database driven applications you can usually stick with a shared hosting account.

When you move on to developing more websites or larger database driven sites or sites which rely heavily on photos or multimedia then I would consider looking at a virtual private server setup. Currently I host about 15-20 sites per virtual server when working on my own projects and I find this quite adequate.

If you need to run demanding applications or require blistering speed then look in to getting a dedicated server. As mentioned the specifications may seem lower than other options but you will get exclusive use of the server and all the resources will be available to you.

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Article by John Blackmore, a search engine optimisation consultant based in Somerset, UK.