Choosing the Right Web Host
You have a domain and a concept for a site. Now you need a host to publish it on the Internet. Totally confusing isn't it--there is a bewildering array of choices, all promising to be the best. Typing web host or web hosting into one of the search engines will get you about 5 times the number of listings as there are for hamburgers and we all know there are way to many hamburger places. So, how do you choose which one to use? It is a three step process. Determine your true needs, research and select a host.
-What type of site do you want to host?
One of the first things you must consider is the type of site you want to have. Will it be a simple static html based site; or will it be a dynamic database driven site? Do you need PHP or some other scripting language? Static html based sites can be served from the most over-loaded of servers and most times will present just fine. The process of serving a simple html page requires very little resources.
The lack of PHP can be a major problem for future use or functionality of a site. Static sites are more trouble to modify because each page is an individual entity and if you want to change a menu or footer link you must open every page, make the change and then upload the page to your site. Rather than repeat what we have already published, we suggest our article What is PHP?. We think you want PHP but the choice is yours.
-How much Space & Bandwidth do you really need?
About 95% of web hosting clients buy way more space and bandwidth than they really need. They are sold the concept that "bigger and more" are better when nothing could be farther from the truth. Do you really want to share a web server with a resource pig? One or two resource pigs can slow an entire server to an unacceptable level.
The average web site uses less than 50MB of disk space and a few gigs (GB) of bandwidth per month. We have 20 sites hosted in one shared account some of which have some rather large files for downloading and all 20 sites use less than 500MB of space.
We may do the detailed math for you in another article. Here let's just say that if the average page with images is 100KB (0.0977MB) and you had 100 pages like that on your site you could store them in 9.7656 megabytes of disk space.
Assume you have those 100 pages and each of them is served 1000 times per day; you would use .95367GB of bandwidth per day and you would need about 30GB per month of bandwidth to handle this extremely popular new site of yours.When you start your shopping keep these numbers in mind when you are looking at the various offers and do not be unduly influenced by the gross over-sellers.
-How many domains do you want to host?
Do you want to add more domains later? Unless you like moving sites from one host to another, I sure don't, one thing you really want to think about is how many sites you may want to own. Fortunately for you addon domains are quite common in the industry now and finding a host that will let you host multiple domains in one account is quite easy. So easy that I would recommend you not even consider a plan that does not allow a generous number. This is one place where "unlimited" is a valid option.
-Is up time Important?
-Is it Uptime or Downtime?
One of the things you should consider looking at is the uptime record of the host you are considering. Uptime refers to the time a host has maintained a live server for a given period of time and is normally expressed as a percentage. Anything under 99% for the long term is unacceptable even for a hobby site. No host is going to hit 100% over a long time period. What we want you to understand is that there is a major difference between 99.9% and 99.5%.
Pardon me while we take a quick look at the math. Using the average of 30.42 days per month, there are 730 hours (43,800 minutes) of time in a month.
99.9% uptime means your site might be down 43 minutes per month.
99.8% uptime means your site might be down 88 minutes per month.
99.5% uptime means your site might be down 219 minutes per month.
99.0% uptime means your site might be down 438 minutes per month.
98.0% uptime means your site might be down 876 minutes per month.
How much downtime are you prepared to accept?
Any host can have a bad month! Look at the long term figures. Better yet look for a host with guaranteed service level (SLA).
This article posted Jan 3, 2009.