Now that your website is ready to be displayed to the public you need to find a company who will host your new website. There are a couple of rules we need to go over before proceeding any further. First rule to avoid? Stay away from free hosts where possible....
When it comes to hosting and deciding whether to purchase your hosting package or sign up for a free account, you'll find you get better features with paid hosting and have technical support when you need it night or day. Generally speaking your bandwidth, both speed and space will be considerably larger than on a free host but most importantly you won't have those annoying banners displaying all over the top of your website. You know the ones I'm talking about. You go to a site and the first quarter page is just one big advertisement. With excellent hosting packages starting from $6.99 per month there is no reason why you shouldn't go with a paid host like godaddy.com
The second rule is deciding which hosting operating system to use. When you first sign up for hosting you’ll be provided to options; Windows Hosting or Linux Hosting? First time users to the world of hosts would be compelled to use Windows Hosting as it's a name that everyone knows and think because they use a windows operating system on their computer or laptop, they feel they should also use the same for hosting. Unfortunately this is not the case. Regardless which of the two hosting packages you choose you’ll be provided a control panel with which to administer your new website. Your control panel will be a graphical environment which you use to control many aspects of your site from setting up and configuring your email address, installing forum software and creating a database. A lot of people will stay within their comfort zone and choose Windows Hosting but remember, most small and large corporate companies host their sites on Linux Servers. Linux Servers are considered to run faster and more secure. Linux allows you to customize the functions you need while Windows will try to include every possible function in their basic package.
When looking for a web hosting company, whether for the inception of a new website or to move an established site; you need to consider a large selection of criteria to determine which hosting company to go with:
Customer support: Website hosting service isn’t just storage or bandwidth. Based on personal experience and that of others, even a top-notch service is worthless without customer support. If you own a business website, your hosting provider needs to be there for you 24/7 and give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your problem; otherwise, you may end up losing customers and money.
Downtime guarantee and service monitoring: Having a personal website go down is a minor inconvenience; having a business website go down is a serious matter. What amount of profit would you lose if your site had been down for a week? Long downtime may be very harmful to today's companies which spend large amounts of money on advertising their websites. Essentially, there are two rules regarding reliability that one should look at:
1. You should check if there is an uptime guarantee offered. A truly service-oriented provider will also give a money-back guarantee, offering a discount or free service as compensation for downtime. Any company which avoids taking responsibility won't put much effort into the service.
2. I definitely wouldn't go with a company claiming 100% uptime, as there is no such thing as a server with 100% uptime. If anyone ever claims their server has a 100% uptime they are either lying or they don't perform the necessary upgrades that prevent a machine from being compromised.
Reputable web hosts will post statistics on their site: What is the frequency of interruption? How about the average percentage of downtime? If these aren’t posted, ask; if the answer isn’t forthcoming, that should be a warning sign. If you still go with a host which doesn't monitor servers, you'll have to do the monitoring yourself. I recommend http://www.siteuptime.com, as it's one of the best monitoring services available for free in the market today.
Backups: There is no host which is safe against different types of technical and programmatic failures, so make sure that the company runs scheduled backups. The other advice would be always having a backup of your website yourself, as you never know what might happen. cPanel, which is the most popular web hosting management software at this time, has a very comfortable backup-making tool. It allows you to backup files and databases quickly and easily, so backups are no longer a problem.
Acceptable use policy: Web hosts may have 200-300 or more clients per server; there is no exact number, as companies have different hardware and each hosted website has different resource usage. There always is a possibility that a few of those customers host illegal content. There are web hosts who have had their servers unplugged, resulting in their clients’ websites going down. I'm sure you don't want to put your business at risk and have your website hosted on the same server together with illegal pornography and software sites, so check host's acceptable use policy to find out, if the host takes care of what's hosted on their servers.
Hosting your site on an uncared-for server will also result in a low speed. If somebody on the same server sends spam, the server's IP address will be blacklisted and you'll have serious problems as recipients stop receiving your emails. Use the "Spam database lookup" feature on www.DNSstuff.com to check if a web hosting company is blacklisted. Spam is being sent almost everywhere, so having one or two red records isn't that bad; but, if there are more, it may become a problem later on.
Unlimited bandwidth and web space: In web hosting industry, the adage "you get what you pay for" is almost universally applicable. Do not fall for hosts offering unlimited allowances, as there is no unlimited bandwidth, nor unlimited web space. Host's pay for each GB of bandwidth themselves. Hard drives also aren't free, so how can they say it's unlimited? They simply are performing false advertising in order to attract customers. The average website doesn't use more than 1GB of bandwidth per month; the customer is happy as he bought something "unlimited" and the host gets a new customer, which won't cost them any more than $1-2 USD per month. But imagine what would happen if I had a website, burning much more bandwidth than an average site does, and I signed up with a hosting company offering unlimited traffic? The host would simply suspend my account and tell me, that it was using too much bandwidth. There even are companies which offer unlimited bandwidth and have a statement on their terms of service, explaining that unlimited bandwidth means 40GB, for example.
Will you really own your domain name? When you buy a domain name together with a website hosting package, make sure the host will register the domain name under your name. It usually should be written in their FAQ, but, if there is no such information, simply contact them. This will also give you an opportunity to check how fast their customer support team replies to inquiries. If the hosting company registers domains under someone else's name, you may have problems switching hosting providers later. If you were in such situation, you would have to file for a Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which costs much more than both domain name and web hosting service together.
Control Panel: For ease of maintenance, a feature called a Control Panel is a necessity; this tool will normally allow for regular maintenance, be it email mailbox additions/deletions, password resets, web additions, web count reports, statistics and so on. If the site is for any sort of business, this is an absolute must. The most popular web hosting management software currently available is cPanel. It's a next-generation web hosting control panel system that allows you to manage your domain through a web interface. The idea is to transfer as much of the control of managing your web site to you; you have the ability to manage all aspects of e-mail, files, backup, FTP, CGI scripts, and web site statistics.
Value-added services: Hosting companies offer different value-added services in order to set themselves apart from the competition. Of course, these are an advantage, but a common mistake customers make is choosing a host just because it offers many value-added services which won't be used anyway. Some of the really useful features are:
Auto-installer script – Auto-installers will save you time if you are going to install a forum, image gallery, content management system, etc. Installation procedures on an auto-installer script take seconds and can be performed by novices without the need of doing difficult tasks usually associated with installations.
2. Website Builder - It lets you design a website in a few minutes without having any creation software and knowledge. One FREE website builder on the market is NVU; this editor allows for ease of use, full control of color schemes and themes and one-click publishing.
3. For those who want to create stylish and prfoessional looking themes I would reccommend Atristeer as a theme builder and then Dreamweaver to modify and finalize it. Atristeer and Dreamweaver are what I've used to build this simple lay for this site.
You should know yourself that price and allocations aren't as important as the quality of service; if the budget is absolutely limited, then the price can be a valid criterion, but otherwise it shouldn’t receive much credence.
*Note: Part of this article is courtesy of Karolis Petreikis*
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