Web hosting is a service that provides Internet users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center.

Finding Your Web host

There are a few things to look out for when searching for a web host.

When you first plunge yourself in to the world of web hosting, you will be overwhelmed with technical terms such as web space, transfer bandwidth, CGI-BIN, Unix/Windows, Apache, IIS, PHP, MySQL, etc. Get to know what they mean so that you know what your needs are and what you are purchasing.

One thing we look for in a web host is 24hr support and 99% uptime guarantee.  The worst thing that can happen to your web site is it being unavailable to paying customers for several hours or days and lost potential revenue going down with your web host server.

I would usually test their technical support by emailing their support team and see how fast they respond to your email. Or if they have a phone number available I would call them and see what their response time is like.

The cheapest web host is usually not the best web host.  It is common sense that if a web host with unlimited web space and bandwidth usually have more problems than ones with limited bandwidth. 

Get to know the amount of disk space that you think you'll require to build your website.  In most cases 100Mb of space is sufficient for most people, unless you will be storing a lot of your E-books or programs you have created online.

Bandwidth  is the amount of data transferred from your web host to people surfing and downloading from your website.  The greater the bandwidth the better.  Most Web hosting company will charge you extra or disable your website if your site exceeds your bandwidth limit.  It depends on the web hosting company.

Domain name is the name of your web site.  IE. http://www.yoursitename.com .  Some web hosts will allow you to host more than one domain name at once. Some web hosts will also allow you to have sub domain names ie. subdomain.yoursitename.com.  It depends if you want to have multiple sub domain names.

SMTP, IMAP, POP3 Mail Servers, e-mail accounts. Depending on the web host your can have several email accounts with your domain name extension.  ie yourname@yoursitename.com or mom@yoursitename.com.  If you require more than one make sure that you will receive more than one.  Your email also can use up your web space and bandwidth limits.

FTP File Transfer Protocol, FTP support is important since this is the easiest ways to transfer your website over to the server. Most web host will support this but some will not.

Other things I usually look for are Databases (MySql, phpMyadmin) and the types of scripts that they support (PHP, Pearl). For the small website it is unlikely that you will ever need to know about any of them. If you are a web designer creating complex database driven sites then you will already know what you need. If after creating your site you have never heard of ASP, ColdFusion, SQL Server, mySQL - then chances are that you don't need to worry about any of these things. If you plan to add a message board to your website then you will need a mySQL database. This is the most common database used with discussion boards.

It is possible to get free web hosting accounts. These are great for small websites, but normally you have to have a banner ad at the top of every page. Some free accounts let you use your domain name (free virtual hosting) and with some your website address is a subdomain of the free hosting company (www.yoursitename.freehosting.com). This second type is called Free Sub-domain hosting.

Hosting for small websites can be very cheap, but If you can answer yes to all of the following questions, then free web hosting may be right for you.

• I don't care about having ads at the top of every page in my website
• I don't care about the performance / reliability of the website
• I don't expect any customer support
• My website is very small and will never grow

Webhostingtalk.com is a very good place to check out what good or bad web hosts are out there.

Findmyhosting.com is a Free, Unbiased comprehensive web host resource and can help you find the web host that suites you most.

Webfina.com is a very reliable web host that we use with excellent technical support.

 

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