Who will host me?
When you decide that the time is right to get a website online,
one of the first things you will require is a web hosting
company. Alongside the design and marketing aspect, your web
host is probably the most important factor to consider. Of
course if you are just wishing to host a small, fun website,
dedicated to telling the world a little about yourself, then a
free web hosting company would suffice. If, on the other hand,
you are interested in a more serious aspect, you will have a
multitude of web hosting companies to choose from, all offering
different items in their packages, that may well overwhelm you
and at the least, confuse you!
All set hosting plans come with details of what you will be
getting for your money. These will include things like
bandwidth, which is a measure of how much ‘information’ is sent
and received between the server, where your website will be
hosted, and the viewer or visitor. This is measured in Megabytes
(MB) or Gigabytes (GB). Basically, the more your website has on
it, like photographs and graphics, the more bandwidth is used to
show the web site to the visitor.
You will also be told how much space you will be allocated on
the server for storing your website files. Again this will vary
from the average of 500MB up to some quite large numbers. If you
only wish to have a few small pages online, then 500MB would be
more than enough space. A shop or ecommerce solution website
would require far more.
Another factor to consider will be email addresses and whether
you will get domain email addresses. These are addresses you can
use such as webmaster@yourdomain.com. a great plus if you are
setting up a business as it gives a far more professional look
to your enterprise. If your new hosting plan allows unlimited
web or domain email addresses you can give every member of your
staff their own private email address, and make it easier for a
customer or prospective customer, to contact the right person,
directly. The other benefit of web or domain email accounts is
that it can be accessed via a POP3 mail client such as Outlook,
Outlook Express, Thunderbird etc.
One very important thing you should consider, is whether there
is FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and how it is implemented. You
may be only able to access your web space to transfer files via
the control panel after logging into it through your web browser
or you may be able to use any third party FTP client software.
The latter is the preferred method as you have more control over
the files and folders and can do more advanced things like
CHMODing the files if files like CGI scripts are going to be
used.
Subdomains are another item to look out for. Subdomains allow
you to create a ‘mini site’ but using your original domain name
in the title. You can use it for a specific area of your main
website. for example, a website about do it yourself, called
http://www.doityourself.com, could have ‘mini sites’ called
wallpaper, painting and flooring, which would be on the sub
domains http://wallpaper.doityourself.com,
http://painting.doityourself.com and
http://flooring.doityourself.com. As you can see, subdomains
create attractive, new mini sites using the main domain name and
can be a lot easier to remember the some obscure page on your
main site.
MySQL databases often get included in a web hosting plan, These
are required for some more advanced scripts. If you know about
installing scripts, you will know if you need these or not and
if you are going to have enough! If you are getting another
person or company to install a script for you, then they will
advise on whether you require databases or not.
All these things only barely touch on what a web host can offer
you. the easiest method for choosing a web host is to take
advantage of their support system. This should be free and
accessible to all users and prospective clients as well. ASK the
web host what they recommend and WHY they recommend that.
EXPLAIN to the web host what your plans for your website is,
whether you plan to expand or not and ask the host if they are
flexible enough to add items as you require them, like extra
room, bandwidth etc. A good web host will gladly take the time
to answer you and assist you in your choice, after all a web
host wants their customer to be happy!
