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Determine your needs, research, and prepare!Mar 07 '01 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line The most important key to finding a great host is to first determine your own needs. Once you have determined your needs, then the selection process can begin. Read On: Anyone can go to GeoCities or HomeStead and get a free personal web site. For the purpose of this article, we will focus on professional business website hosting. The availability and variety of domain hosting today is astonishing! From free to very expensive, options for everyone abound. The trick is to sort it all out. To begin with, you should determine your needs. To help, try answering these questions: 1) What is the purpose of my web site? 2) Who is my target audience? 3) Will I be selling a product or service? 4) How much traffic / how many visitors do I anticipate? 5) Will I need CGI/ASP/PHP / Front Page extensions 6) Do I want / need to register a domain (www.my_site.com) or will a subdomain (my_site.my_host.com or www.my_host.com/my_site) suit my purposes? For a professional site, I highly recommend that you register your domain name. Shop around for domain registration services; domain names that were $35/year 2 years ago, were $15/year last year, and now can be purchased for $8.95/year for 1 year, or $6.95/year for 10 years... If you are selling widgets, you need to register your widget domain name before someone else beats you to it! "www.widgets.com" is much more attractive and memorable than "www.my_hosts_site.com/members/area42/my_widgets.html". You do want return visitors, don't you? For hosting selections, it pays to research up front. Many companies will host your site for free; in return, they expect you to carry advertising for them and their sponsors, in the form of inline banners (usually at the top of every page) or pop-ups, or sometimes both. Most free hosting companies want you to upgrade (for a fee, of course) to their ad-free hosting. I recently had a "free" hosting company start running offensive (off-color/adult) pop-up ads on one of my "free" domains (in addition to the in-line banners), even though their own TOS (Terms Of Service) forbade such offensive ads. When I emailed their tech support asking to have the offensive adds removed, they replied that I could either pay to upgrade to their ad-free plan, or put up with the offensive ads. I found another free host, and moved my domains. It may be a good idea to consider a free host, if your time-frame allows, at least for a month or two, to get a feel for the speed and reliability of your chosen host, and for the type of support you might expect from them. If you find a free host with speed, reliability, and adequate service, then you can consider purchasing the ad-free hosting service from them. A Baker's Dozen key criteria for choosing a web host: 1) Cost 2) Connection(s) to the internet (T1, T3, OC3, etc.) 3) Is their NOC (network operations center) monitored? 4) Disk space allowance / limits / costs for extra space 5) Data transfer quantities / limits / costs for extra 6) SLA (Service Level Agreement) - do they guarantee uptime? 7) Where are they located? (geographical proximity)? 8) Do they allow CGI / ASP / PHP / SSI / Shopping Cart? 9) Do they support Front Page extensions? 10) Do they offer FTP / shell access? 11) Email options? Autoresponders? 12) Do they offer statistics / visitor tracking? 13) Security: Do they allow or support SSL certificates? There are many dynamic factors to consider when choosing a host. It is almost impossible to cover them all here. Even with experience with several sites on various hosts, I still learn something almost every day. So can you.  |
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