Web Hosting: Which is the host with the most?
So you want to publish a web site do you? Welcome to the club.
These days it seems that almost everyone has a web site of some
kind, and thousands more continue to be launched every day. It's
challenging enough to design a site and fill it with interesting
content, but when all is said and done another challenge still
remains - where to host it?
A popular choice for newbie webmasters, and even experienced
ones, is to secure a free hosting plan with a company such as
Yahoo! Geocities, Tripod or Angelfire. While these are easy to
setup and free of charge, they do have limitations. Most free
hosts don't offer all the nice features that paid hosts do such
as FTP access, CGI-BIN, or your own personal domain name.
Instead you're stuck with minimal features and a generic URL
such as www.freewebhost.com/marcswebsite. This somewhat limits
your web site‘s potential. Most free hosts also require you to
run banners or pop-up ads on your web site to make it worth
their while - these banners and pop-ups can obstruct the view of
your web page and ultimately annoy visitors and drive them away.
Lastly, most free hosts have a daily bandwidth limit that is
very small, so if you do get a lot of traffic you'll most likely
exceed the allotted bandwidth and your site will be temporarily
disabled. Overall I would recommend free web hosts for people
that are new to web hosting and want to get a feel for how it
works. I'd also recommend them for web sites that are personal
in nature (such as an online journal) as well as web sites that
don't plan to generate any revenue. Free web hosts are a great
stepping stone to paid web hosts - I myself starting building
web sites 4 years ago using free hosts, and today I run several
high traffic web sites that are hosted on paid web hosting
plans.
Now it's time to get into the good stuff - paid web hosting. Web
hosting companies that charge money for their services are
plentiful on the Internet, and feature a wide array of hosting
packages at various price points. First we begin with so called
"budget" web hosts, who claim to offer you the world for only $1
per month. Having used numerous such companies I feel I must
tell you to proceed with caution here, as these companies aren't
all that they are cracked up to be. Many claim to offer 24/7
e-mail support, which in my experience turned out to be 0/0
e-mail support. My e-mails were either never answered or
answered a week after I sent them. Even when I got a response it
was generic in nature and completely unhelpful. Also, expect
frequent outages with these budget web hosts as they rarely even
have their own web servers - often they are reselling space on
someone else's web servers over which they have no control. One
budget web host I used went down unexpectedly for 6 days, and
they didn‘t even bother to notify their customers. As a result,
my web site was down for 6 days and I lost most of my visitors
as well as my hard-earned search engine rankings. Lesson
learned: if the reliability and success of your web site is
important to you, budget web hosting might not be the answer.
However, this is not to say that all budget web hosts are bad -
1dollarhosting.com is one of the leaders in the budget web
hosting arena and has quite a good reputation.
The next type of paid web host is what I refer to as a
"mid-range" web host, meaning that they offer prices and service
that will satisfy the majority of web sites out there. Mid-range
web hosts like PowWeb, Your-Site.com and iPowerWeb offer
packages ranging from $5 to $8 per month and provide the tools
that most webmasters will need to run a web site, such as:
CGI-BIN, tons of e-mail addresses, FTP support, visitor
statistics and more. These hosts do have monthly bandwidth
limits, but the limits are quite high, and most web sites will
never reach them. However, if your web site features hundreds of
file downloads and gets decent traffic you may be shocked at how
soon you'll reach those bandwidth limits. When you do, your site
may be temporarily shut down or you'll have to pay bandwidth
overage charges, which can get pricey. Overall though, mid-range
web hosts will be satisfactory for 90% of the web sites out
there, and generally offer excellent uptime/reliability. In
fact, many web-based businesses are successfully run using a
mid-range web host. However, as mentioned previously, web sites
that offer large files for download or sites that get a huge
amount of traffic may find that a mid-range host doesn't quite
suit their needs. These types of web sites may require
"high-end" web hosting solutions, the next topic in our
discussion.
High-end web hosts typically service web sites that are
extremely popular, have a high amount of traffic, and/or require
pretty much 100% uptime. Most businesses rely on high-end web
hosts to host their web sites. Rackspace.com is an example of a
well known high-end web hosting company. Pricing for high-end
hosts varies, but typically runs from about $50 per month to
several hundred dollars per month. Many high-end hosts give you
your own dedicated server (which they support) that is reserved
just for you and your web site. The mid-range hosts I discussed
earlier typically host many different web sites on the same
server - this is known as "shared" hosting. High-end web hosts
offer stellar reliability, bandwidth, and just about every tool
you'll ever need to run a successful web site. Another feature
that some high-end web hosts provide is "co-location" hosting.
In this scenario, YOU configure and provide the web server, but
you get to plug it into their data center/network. This can be
very nice because their data center usually has a fiber-optic
connection directly to the Internet, offering blazing bandwidth
and stellar reliability. People who run web-based businesses or
extremely popular, high traffic web sites are good candidates
for high-end web hosting.
Hopefully this brief overview gives you a good picture of the
various types of web hosts that exist, and which one might be
right for you. When you begin your search for a web host, always
keep in mind the old adage "You get what you pay for" because it
really does hold true in this case. Before you make the
commitment to host a web site be sure to take some time and
analyze what you want out of the web site, and decide which
factors are most important to its success. Answering these
questions will get you many steps closer to choosing the web
host that's right for you.
