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.
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