So you need Hosting. Where to look? Who's the best? The cheapest? The most secure? Has better up-time, better control-panel, better support...? *phew* Tons of important Q's with very few impartial A's. Often times we'll just type "Hosting Reviews" in a given search engine then spend hours rifling through the paid ads, the hard-sells and the poorly written 'they stole my money' rants. While not very productive, at least you can hit the sack feeling like you've accomplished something. Even if you didn't settle on a Host.
But, you *need* to settle on a host and you *need* one that won't break the bank and has a reliable support system in place that meets your needs. This is key because if you're doing this on your own, you're going to need some help along the way - hopefully it won't be too often, but when it's needed, oh boy is it needed!
Step 1: Define Your Hosting Needs
Right out of the gate, before you start looking, you need to define your website's hosting needs. This will directly affect your bottom dollar and your website's functionality (not to mention your sanity). You don't want to pay for something you won't ever use and you want to make sure you have available what you'll need.
Hosting can be expensive but it can also be super-cheap. The difference between the two are huge, with varying services, bandwidth allowances, storage capacity etc. What is key here is that you understand how Hosting charges and what services you need to have in your 'hosting package' to have your website be able to do what you want it to do.
Storage is all about how much space you have to store all your website data. Storage is disk-space so the more storage you need the more you'll need to pay. Yes there are plenty of cheap, unlimited deals out there but you want a website not a 'sorta-website-until-you've-broke-the-fine-print-in-their-TOS-and-now-have-a-no-website-website'. Read the Terms Of Service carefully!
Bandwidth is typically measured in megabytes per month. This is the amount of data that is consumed by your visitors on a monthly basis. Keep an eye on this number while you shop around - it will fluctuate a lot. If your needs are small then you don't have to worry about it, however, if you plan on making that next big blog-experience and get payed by unique visitors, bandwidth is important to note. The plan you select needs to be able to cover the monthly allowance lest your visitors get served up a dose of 404 or your credit-card gets up-charge per/MB over your allowance. Read the Terms Of Service (;
You will need a Domain Name, of course. I've never bought a domain outside of a reputable domain name registrar. Try and avoid the cheap-domain-name-deals. Some registrars force you to take on hosting plans and others won't let you change the DNS to move to another hosting provider, thus forcing you to buy into their Hosting services - which isn't so bad, I guess, if you like what they have to offer. Still, beware and read the Terms of Service.
Up-time is something that has become somewhat of a frivolous sell these days. I mean, who's going to say they have a 45% uptime? Or 83%? Everyplace you go will say 99% or even 99.999% so you can pretty much ignore it. Even the scammers and cramers will say 99% making the whole up-time guarantee a pointless pitch. Even though it's important to host your site with a reliably stable provider, you really won't know how reliable they are until you either use them or find someone who does. And keep in mind that sites will still go down - for server maintanance, buggy issues, snagged traffic and depending on what Hosting solution you decide on, a slew of other reasons.
Types of Web HostingShared Hosting:
If you just need a basic hosting plan with selectable frills and a control-panel that lets you upload your files for just a few bucks a month then Shared Hosting is what you're looking for. Shared Hosting has as many options as one could imagine so there’s lots of room to breath here. You wont have to worry about administering the server, updates are done by the hosting company and if you don't need 'X', you don't pay for 'X'.
There are basically two types of Shared Hosting - Windows Hosting and Linux. Windows Hosting uses a Windows operating system (like Windows Server 2008 as an example) to host all the websites on the server. Additional services and support for ColdFusion, ASP.NET and the like are all available under Windows hosting so if you're into building web-applications or your site requires a specific language or backend then Windows Hosting is what you need. Linux Hosting is probably the most popular form of hosting, if you have a forum or blog or maybe a php based Mom & Pop store then you don't really need to shell out more money for Windows Hosting. While you won't be able to run Windows based applications, the open-source community for Linux is massive thus making a Linux solution the one to beat when it comes to cost effective hosting.
The upside to a Shared Hosting solution is that maintanance, updates, security and server administration is all taken care of by the hosting provider - freeing you up to focus on the website. The downside to Shared Hosting is, of course, that it's shared. This opens up all kinds of realiabilty and security issues so choose your Hosting company carefully. There's nothing worse than a Hosting company who doesn't apply the latest updates or crams way too many sites on a server and slows the whole server down for everybody. In some cases even a badly coded website can ruin the experience for all the other websites on the server or worse, expose security flaws. A few ways you can tell, if your page regularly takes more than 10 seconds to load (baring any DB queries or media) and its really nothing more than a static page -If your email is getting bounces back (IP blocked because of spammers on your server) -How often and for how long your website, web-control or email is unavailable. If you've hit the wall with any of those, it's time to get out!
Dedicated Server & VPS Solutions:
But maybe shared hosting just isn't cutting it for you. Reports of slow load times because your databases take ages to propagate into your page and there's an overall malaise to navigating your huge website, with thousands of registered users and massive amounts of real-time number crunching. Well then, it's probably time to move to a VPS, or, if you have the cash - A Dedicated server.
On a VPS you'll be able to manage you're own partition with your own operating system which you can reboot independently but the server as a whole will still have a few other websites on it and, hence, you wont have 100% access over that servers hardware resources (RAM, CPU) 100% of the time. Think of it as you're own drive on your home computer. While you might have two or three separate drives on your home computer, all the drives are sharing the one system. But this doesn't mean a VPS is 'just a little better' than a Shared hosting solution or worse than a Dedicated server - not where money and speed are concerned, anyways. While a Shared solution might have a few hundred sites sharing one server's resources, a VPS solution might have handful all running independently of each other and freeing up resources more dramatically and more often, making the end-users experience on your huge website much smoother.
A Dedicated Server is exactly that. You have a singularly dedicated server just for you. You have you're own computer with full control over its resources to use as you see fit. You have to manage and administer all your own updates, install your own operating system and programs. While the Hosting provider might offer administration as an add-on services, the choice is yours to go at it alone or with your own team. Of course this option is more for power-users than anyone else and is the most expensive option.
Step 2: Finding a Good Web Host
Once you've defined your hosting needs and how much you can afford, its time to shop around.
First, ask anyone you know who has a website, about their host. Get first-hand reviews. You might be suprised how many of them tell you to avoid the one they use. Of course that won't always be the case but if you know a lot of people with websites, it does happen. On the other hand, those who don't tell you to avoid the companies they use, will be the exact opposite - glowing and overly happy about who they are hosted with, most of whom probably wouldn't know the difference anyways.
When you're ready, do a search for the hosting companies and append 'reviews' or, 'is great' or 'sucks' to their name in the search box - so type: 'BlahHosting reviews' (where BlahHosting is the company name you want to read reviews about). This isn't a hard and fast rule to see who's good and who's not but it will certainly bring to light any scammers or those with consistently bad reputations and practices. Cross them off when you've read enough horror-stories.
After you've settled on a few, it doesn't have to be a solid 'settle' just grab the ones that catch your attention based on your own criteria then visit their sites, one by one and click the support button on their website - be it an email or Live Chat ( I prefer Live Chat because it's a lot faster to diagnose ) In your email, ask questions, it doesn't mater what you ask as long as they require answers. In Live Chat, do the same thing but generally speaking, you may as well hang-up once they answer because thats the whole point - whether someone is there or not. Make sure you do this during business hours, preferably early in the day so you know they have a few hours to get your email, or that someone is in the office to accept your Live Chat request. If the Live Chat goes unanswered, put that company down the list. If your email goes the rest of the day unanswerd, put it next to the Live Chat Ignorers. Try it as often as you like for as long as you like. The longer you go ignored or your emails unanswered, the worse they are.
Check for the money-back guarantee and read the fine-print. Most Hosting companies will have all the good and bad details in the fine print; hidden addendums, fees and limitations. Make sure you understand what kind of service you're buying into when you're ready.
Still confused? That's exactly what this forum is for. Ask us for help!
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