Web Hosting Need to Know Guide

Overview

My overall ranking will be a 1 to 5 scale, 1 being the total worst and 5 being top dog. The ranking takes into account features, performance, uptime, price and customer service or support. The results are based on first-hand experience acquired developing and deploying web solutions for myself and several clients over the past decade and then some. Anyone can avoid costly mistakes by learning from my experience and the experience of my clients. I have certainly been on the Internet awhile and having worked and managed several HelpDesks as well as being a certified professional webmaster, can tell you what is what in an unbiased manner.

Each of the top web hosting companies you’ll see me cover and have banners for are definitely among the best out there. I’ll do my utmost to update this blog often, not only with reviews, but with free tips and expert advice from colleagues and associates in the filed.

My initial advice would be to find the parameters of your application or website and then select the features of the hosting company that fits or slightly exceeds your needs. There are certainly several available and competition is high, which is fantastic for the consumer!

Price/Month

The price you pay per month for your web hosting service. This price generally requires that you pay for your service in one or two year increments. The price per month decreases as you select longer billing cycles. Generally there is no setup fee if you choose to pay for at least one year at a time.

Uptime Guarantee

Uptime is the promise by the hosting company that their services will serve up your pages to the Internet visitor every time. Generally, if the uptime guarantee is 99.9% then you can expect your website to be down an average of 1 minute and 26.4 seconds per day. While an uptime of 100% is what we all would like in a perfect world, it is simply not attainable in the reality.

Website uptime should be very high on your list of priorities. I know this doesn’t come to mind, first, but believe me when you have 30 or 40 sites on a dedicated server and it goes down, you WILL panic! And, if the customer service is weak, you will pay for it - emotionally and financially.

Disk Storage

Disk storage is the amount of hard drive storage for your website. Yes, this is very similar to your home or business PC, but usually setup in a failsafe method called RAID - a redundant disk array (bunch of hard drives with a failsafe method if one dies, it will continue to function.) This includes your website files and even more importantly all your databases where perhaps inventory is stored.

Today, most web hosting providers either give you unlimited disk space or an extremely high limit. You can estimate the space you will require for your site by checking the total size of all the files included in your site. Although, the size of your databases will be more difficult to calculate, because of their nature - they are built to grow. I recommend choosing a plan with unlimited disk space and this, theoretically, will never be an issue.

Why do I mention “theoretically”? Stay tuned for more on that in another article I will provide or visit my site regularly - again, this is real-world experience!

Bandwidth

Bandwidth? No, it’s not the size of the high school marching band from left to right. In layman’s terms, I always use the industry term “pipe”. Because, I think it helps folks understand it when I use the analogy of a water pipe. That is essentially what bandwidth usage is all about. The bigger your bandwidth pipe, the more Internet visitors can get to your site and the faster your pages are served up to them - and the more money you can make!

Bandwidth is generally given in a monthly “allowance.” Each of your pages may average about 300KB. A few pages visited by one Internet user or consumer would then triple or quadruple this number to say about 1200KB or 1.2 MB. If you had a few thousand visitors in a single month, this number would hit about 1.5 GB. Bottom line, if your site becomes very popular then you could end up using a lot of bandwidth capacity per month.

Therefore, if you are thinking long-term, this can be a serious consideration. This determination might also be looked at by your target audience. A website for your church, for example, won’t need much bandwidth. But, let’s take a online store, for example. You could possible get visits from all over the world, provided your advertising budget allows it or you know some great inexpensive marketing techniques - that I may just reveal in an upcoming article!

Live Phone Support

All over the world, we have been sucked into the technology age and love to sent text messages and electronic mail. We are literally trained to do it! I hardly ever pickup the phone and ask someone to do something.

BUT…, if I’m stuck due to a server limitation and I’m in the “zone”, I want a body on the other end of that phone line ASAP. And, if the server is having issued as notified to me by a client or customer, the same holds true. You’ll want LIVE phone support!

Coupons and Specials

I thought I would throw this one in there. Competition is fierce when it comes to . Why, you may ask? It may seem clear to some, but not so for newbies. Let me give it to you from an experience perspective, once again.

When you hookup with a good hosting provider, you tend to stick with them for years. Web hosting companies realize this. The last thing anyone wants to do is move a website - all the files, databases, images, etc. - from one host to another. Not only is there a concern for downtime (money potentially lost,) but, there is a high probability of something else going extremely wrong during the transition - thereby, MORE downtime.

Okay, I digress….back to coupons and specials. Because of the genral loyalty to a good hosting provider, many hosting companies will give up 10-20% on the initial sale. So, get on your favorite search engine and look for a valid un-expired coupon. Heck, if you find one and are not sure about expiration, try it anyway. They’ll let you know if it isn’t current.