I am in the process of building a website. I will host it using another company’s server. Is it best to use the hosting facilities provided by your ISP, or use a dedicated web hosting company? Which features will good web hosts offer, and how much web space would be considered the minimum?
Is it for personal or commercial use? What kind of services do you need? How important is this website?
A useful link (UK-biased but the questions remain salient):
http://www.internet-magazine.com/hosting/questions2.asp
Most hosts seem to offer nearly everything you could concievably require, including all kinds of server-side stuff.
From bitter experience, may I suggest:
-Find a host that has been trading for at least a year, more than two is better still.
-Make sure that they will register your domains in your name, not ‘c/o [hosting company]’.
I’m trying to sort out a transfer of domains right now; our previous host vanished without a trace, so I couldn’t contact them to get them to change the IPS tag, Nominet can do this, but it’s only straightforward if the domain is properly registered to the owner - ours was registered ‘care of Square Internet’ - I now have to prove ownership before the transfer will happen.
I tend to say that it won’t matter much in the beginning, you will get ripped off no matter what you do.
Since you’re asking the question in the first place, I have to assume that you are fairly inexperienced, so I would recommend a national company known for customer service (if one exists), or at least one whose name you are familiar with. The first $30/month you spend should cover your site for a while, unless the site becomes popular very quickly. Hosts are available much cheaper but for a standard $30 you can get first class hosting - if maybe still overpriced.
I pay $1.50/gigabyte of bandwidth and get great service. If your site begins to use substantial bandwidth, don’t get stuck paying $20/gig like many hosting providers still attempt to charge.
What ever you do, be wary of “unlimited bandwidth”. This is impossible to provide, and it’s misleading to the consumer. It basically means “stuff 100 people onto a server, and let them fight it out for minimal bandwidth and let all their sites slow to crawl”. As soon as you begin to reach the level of bandwidth they are charging you for, they will either raise the price or just kick you off the server.
I assume you have a domain name for the site. It’s worth noting that there is competition between registrars and $35/year is laughable. (some still charge that much!)
Most hosts will provide options for telnet access, perl, php, mysql, asp, etc… for no extra charge. Don’t get suckered into paying extra.
Finally, disk space is probably the last of your concerns. To answer your question, 25 megs is probably the minimum, but you probably won’t need anywhere near that, and if you need more, it should be pracitally free.
Without having any idea the nature or size of your website, it’s impossible to advise.
Here’s a discussion board site you might find useful:
I’ll start by saying I’m a customer of the following, but have no other vesting in it at all.
Check out http://www.suite.net. I’ve been using them since 1998, and have never been disappointed (well, I wish they had procmail installed). It’s not a large, fancy corporation, and their web site isn’t very fancy, but you will deal with the owner directly. He’s always been of great service whenever I called/emailed with stupid technical questions (like “where’s mySQL installed?”). I’ve generally gotten answers to my emails within a couple of hours, even late at night (well, not three in the morning).
A lot of your decision would come down to “whats the purpose of your site?” For me, it’s a permanent-for-life domain (yes, registered in YOUR NAME via OpenSRS) and a place to host my freeware Windows stylesheet editor, my Mac OS X HTML Tidy’er, and my Mac OS X printing guide. Also, my bandwidth isn’t huge – for file distribution, I actually link to my Comcast, unlimited bandwidth, or my .Mac 1-gig/day bandwidth. I use PHP and mySQL to run a (somewhat neglected) phpBB message board. I don’t do e-commerce currently, but they have that capability.
You also have the very, very cheap choice of domain forwarding. So, you can actually have Comcast (for example) host your site for “free”, but have Suite.Net handle the URL redirection for a transparent experience.
For hosting, you get these for about $105 per year (I think; it’s thereabouts) including OpenSRS domain name registration. It’s 50megs of storage, which is fine for me (and as I said I put “big” stuff on my other servers). You get 500Mb of bandwidth (again, plenty for text and graphics – files on the other servers). You get mySQL and PHP and CGI and all kinds of other server-side goodies. Actually, they have multiple servers, so if you want MS FrontPage instead of the good Unix stuff, let them know. Actually, if you want the good Unix stuff instead of Frontpage, let them know – the owner told me most of their “basic” customers prefer FrontPage, so that’s the default host server. Oh, and go ahead and ask for ssh/telnet access. It’s usefull for debugging PHP scripts and working with mySQL remotely, especially if you’re doing your work on a Windows box. You’d also get an unlimited, all purpose POP3 box for any email address at your domain; all mail to your domain goes to the same box. But you can also set up email forwarding for certain address.
Good luck, and have fun!
These posts about domains are misleading.
You don’t have to, and shouldn’t, get your domain through the host. They do nothing for you that you couldn’t do for yourself, and sometimes they even charge a surcharge. The worst ones, as stated, could even put it in their name or put themselves in for all the contacts - effectively taking complete control of your domain.
www.dotster.com is my favorite. They aren’t the cheapest, but still the best IMO.
Here’s what I use as my domain registrant and hosting co. :
An incredible Rs.450/- (~US$9) for a domain name for 1 year.
The most basic hosting (only 2mb, no extras) begins at Rs.850/- (~US$17) for 1 year.
I’m amazed they offer it so cheap. And I’ve used them for over 2 years now. So if you’re looking for something cheap but still good, you could check them out.
If you want it still cheaper, you can register a domain name with any registrar, then use http://www.mydomain.com as your hosts. They’re a free service that forwards your url. So if you can’t afford hosting space, or already have some other domain hosted somewhere, you can use this service. You can even setup sub-domain pointers, etc. It’s excellent.
Dunmurry, unless you offer specifics about your website and your needs (and budget) we can only offer general solutions.
When I, as a novice, started I researched as hard as I could. The most recomended company was dismally inadequate. Changinging to a new one was a hassle and they weren’t much better.
Starting over, I decided to get to the bottom of this…I ended up with this company:
http://websitesource.com/
This will sound like a GD, but trust me, almost regardless of what kind of site you are putting up these people are the BEST.
I have had no problems AT ALL. Customer service is 24/7 and rock solid. Free domain registration and several hundred links to help you with your site (building, Java, listing, etc). A lot of them to outside sites for comparison and more technical info.
At least visit this site before you buy. And if you are new at this, IMHO, registration by the hosting company IS important.
Lots of luck. Additionally, there is a book, ‘Cheap Web Tricks’, (Anne Martinez, Osborne Publishing, $19.99), that’s worth getting just for the promotion info which you will find is another whole issue after you get your site up and running.
Here is a good list of non technical tests that correlate pretty well with being happy with a hosting company.
- Call them on their tech support line. Does a real person answer, or you sent though and endless maze of confusing voice menus and finally have to just leave a message.
- Try the same trick with their other published numbers, billing for example.
- Send some emails to various positions within the company that you would expect to deal with and see how quickly your questions are answered.
Customer service is generally one of the biggest problems with “cheap” hosting companies.
I’ve had several people who were looking for hosts and sorted the list that met there needs technically by cheapest first. Then start calling/emailing the list. They then picked the first one that was prompt about answering the phone and email.
So, far this tactic has worked quite well.
I make sure they have been around at least three years or more. Next is reading their website to see if they have a lot of info on it & writing them one email to see how long it takes to get a reply. Then space & cost.
Y’all can laugh, but I remember seeing One Dollar Hosting ads in LA years ago so i went with them for one web site this year. One dollar a month, plus setup. 20 megs.