Creating a Website series: Registering Your Domain | Choosing A Hosting Provider
Choosing A Hosting Provider
You've heard the term "website hosting" but you aren't quite certain what it entails, who the best choice is, what you actually NEED for hosting purposes. This article will help you understand some basics aspects of website hosting and how to decide what's best for you.
What is web hosting? Essentially, consider the hosting server as the file cabinet where you keep your website files.
This article talks about the following:
- Beware of hosting companies out there: don't make the mistake I made
- What you need to focus on and What To Expect
- All those options and what they mean to you
- When to Choose/Buy/Select your Hosting Provider
Hosting Companies Out There: Don't Make The First Mistake I Made
I am a big believer in name recognition and referrals for hosting providers. Unfortunately, there are too many scams out there and people who will take your money and run. This happened to me long, long ago as I was just getting into the realm of websites and hosting. I chose one because they were cheap and looked good. How wrong I was. I paid my money and never got a single thing for it. I couldn't contact anyone via a phone number or email address.
Important to note: Just because a phone number or email address is listed on their website does NOT mean anyone will respond.
After that lesson learned, I began to do my research. I used search engines extensively. I called numbers listed on websites. I looked for referrals from other people I knew who had websites. Today that's much easier to do. There are some big players (such as GoDaddy.com) in the hosting business that most everyone has heard of. No matter who you choose, make sure you can reach someone in person via their phone lines, make sure they are responsive to emails and that you like their customer service BEFORE you pay.
It's their job to win your business: let them.
My hosting company of choice: Hostgator.com
I have a reseller account with hostgator, to provide my design clients with hosting and design all in one place. Hostgator is very simple to use, cost-effective as well. They utilize the universal Control Panel (cpanel) found on many other hosting companies, so it's easy to navigate.
The choice is yours. There are plenty of other hosting providers to choose from out there - most of which are great options. Just before you choose, do your homework.
What you Need to Focus On and What To Expect
You'll have some basic requirements to consider before making your choice. From this list, choose what's most important to you and go from there. In the next section, I'll go over the options offered with many hosting plans to help you further decide.
Cost: Hosting costs can range from a few dollars a month to twenty dollars a month. Does this follow the "You Get What You Pay For" cliche? Not really.
I find the average costs you should expect to pay are between $5.00 per month and $11.00 per month. If you are willing to pay for six months or a year in advance (a good option) then you'll get a lesser cost. But most hosting providers also offer a one or two-month ahead option as well.
Ease of Use: Consider your acumen on website technology. How familiar are you with the hosting information you'll need? To manage your own account, you'll need to know how to change over DNS entries, you'll need to know how to upload new files, you'll need to know. If you're a beginner at this, you'll want the simplest, most basic interface to use.
Space: How much space do you need? This is discusses in the options below, but when you're considering the space you'll need know, also consider how much you expect your website to grow. You may start off with only a few pages of text and some images to make it look pretty. What will you want in the future?
The things that can quickly add up on disc space are databases (for a blog for example), images, flash, and PDF docs.
Access and Building the Site: How do you want to access your site? Are you familiar with FTP (file transfer protocol)? Do you use FrontPage? Do you want to upload your files directly on the hosting site? Whatever your choice to build and move files over to the server, be sure the hosting server offers them. (especially check for Frontpage extensions if you use Frontpage.)
Help/Customer Service: Don't underestimate the need for customer service. Prompt help, either via phone or email, is crucial when it comes to hosting companies and in my opinion, can often make the difference between choosing. Give the companies a call or drop them an email--whichever way you would communicate with them going forward -- and see how helpful they are, if you find them easy to get to, easy to communication with. If something is wrong with your site at some point, you need to know that you count on them to be there when you need them.
What ARE all those options anyway?
With every hosting plan you see, you'll find a list of features. I'll go through some of the most basic ones that might concern you:
Monthly Bandwidth: Bandwidth is a measure of data transfer that is found by the number of bits or bytes per unit of time. . Computer data is essentially measured in bits and bytes. (What is this? Check out my "Website and Online Dictionary" for a conversations into megabytes and more.) When a website is visited, data is transferred from the hosting server to the computer of the person visiting the site.
Example: 3GB/Month means the transfer between computers of 320, 864, 256 bytes during the span of one month.
Disc Space: This is how much room on the hosting server you have to put your files, images, and other aspects of your website. GoDaddy's basic plan allows you 10GB (gigabytes) of disc space. ServerPro's basic plan allows you 350 GB of disc space.
Example: A "typical" basic website with HTML and some images only probably uses up 10-30 MB of space. A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes... so if you used 10MB of disc space, you have a 1014 MB left. That's a lot of space.
Email Accounts: An email account in conjunction with a hosting account allows you to have email sent to you via your website. This is especially useful for authors, since you want to keep your fan/writing email address separate from the one you give your friends and family. It also helps to have the option to create additional email addresses off your domain name.
Example: yourname@yourname.com ; info@yourname.com; contest@yourname.com
Email Forwards: Email forwarding allows you to create an email based on your domain name and have that email automatically passed to another email address somewhere else.
Example: Any mail that goes to yourname@yourname.com can be automatically resent to yourname@gmail.com or wherever else you check your daily email. Where this might not be the best option is it you need the option to reply. If you reply from a forwarded email this way, the reply will come from yourname@gmail.com. You will lose the privacy of your personal email address.
Subdomains: A subdomain is a third-level domain that allows for content separation and branding.
Example: about.com is a domain name.
books.about.com is a subdomain.
MYSQL Databases: MySQL is a relational database management system. It's written in a language called C+ and C++. It is the most common open source database server used today. Why would you need it? If you plan on having a blog on your site, if you plan on using PHP or something else that requires database connectivity on your server.
Web-based Control Panel: This is a WYSIWYG website interface that gives you access to the areas of your website to make changes, upload content, add on new applications. GoDaddy uses its own control panel interface. On ServerPro and many others, you'll see a universal control panel called CPanel. (If you wish to see more about that, visit www.cpanel.com)
Mailing Lists: A Mailing list is a list of people who have opted in to receive mail from you. Many hosting providers offer this within their options. If you plan to have a newsletter from your site, this is a good option to consider. It does not SEND mail for you, but it gathers the names in one convenient location.
Site Statistics: This is what will tell you who has visited your site, where they came from and other such information. A hosting provider that does NOT provide this is NOT worth the money, in my opinion. There are plenty who do and it is something you should absolutely have.
CGI-Bin Access: This allows you to place cgi programs on your website server.
Additional Applications/Features: Both GoDaddy and ServerPro provide additional applications with their hosting. (GoDaddy calls this their GoDaddy Hosting Connection and ServerPro includes them in the CPanel). These applications include things such as message boards and forums, blogs, image galleries, wikis, and content management. If you don't know going into this which of these you need, then you probably don't need any of them to start. Just check to see if your hosting provider offers them so when you are ready to expand and build upon your website later, you have the capability to do so.
Linux versus Windows operating system: This is a question about which operating system you prfer on the server (not what you personally work with.) It's a preference thing and if you don't know the difference, it won't affect you either way. Both operating systems provide the basics for a simple website and access capabilities.
When Do you Choose/Select/Buy your Hosting plan?
Not a minute before you need it. :) A website can take a while to create, whether you are doing it yourself or having it designed for you.
Either way, you won't need your hosting plan until the site is ready to be moved over... AFTER it's been designed, after you've added content. Why pay for an extra month or two when you have nothing to put up yet? Purchase that hosting plan just before you're ready to upload your content.
Next in this series, we'll talk about design: do you do it yourself, hire someone else, use a template? What are the benefits and cons of each step? Coming soon!
Up ahead: The basics of HTML and building a site, Working with Images, Working with Content, Learning CSS, and some freebies along the way!
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