What to look for in a web hosting partner

Finding a web site hosting company is easy. There are thousands of them, over 20,000 by one report with more being added all the time. They range in size and the services they offer. Finding a dependable hosting company, however, is not as easy as it looks. Too many hosting companies are the electronic equivalents of the worst used car salesmen. They lie on what they offer with no intention of delivering on what they promise, sell you a package that doesn’t work as promised, overcharge you, and ignore your messages when you e-mail or call trying to resolve a problem.

What types of hosting are there?

A web host is a service provider that places your web site on a computer which is connected to the internet. This then gives people who surf the internet a way to access your website. The computer that the web hosting company uses is typically just like the computer you have at home, the only difference being that it is set up to serve up web sites and is therefore called a "server". There are many different types of hosting out there today. We’ll look at the most common and give a little information about each one.

Virtual Hosting

Virtual hosting is probable the most common type of hosting solution today. Basically a hosting company will take one dedicated server and house up to 200 or more different web sites and/or domain names. This type of hosting is normally very inexpensive and is very economical for most small business and personal web sites.

This type of hosting is very easy to learn and to utilize. There are many different things that can be done with a virtual hosting account. Most of which small business and personal web sites will never utilize. So if a company or personal web site is; small, doesn’t require many resources, and basically needs an online presence, virtual hosting is the way to go and also the most economical.

The downside to virtual hosting is that these servers can get very busy. The result of which is that your site might be fast when it first goes live but slows down as more and more sites share your server’s resources.

A new thing is starting to come up. Certain search engines may penalize sites that are on a server with red flag sites like gambling, spam sites, adult, etc. Gambling and adult sites tend to spam a lot so search engines may be penalizing whole servers that house these sites. Make sure your web host will put you on a server free of these types of websites.

Semi-Dedicated & VP (Virtual Private) Servers

Semi-Dedicated hosting, also known as VPS or Virtual Private Servers are the next step up from Virtual Hosting. This type of hosting is for growing web sites and business that need more server resources or require specific software to make a site function correctly.

VP servers are a great step up, allowing a user more control and versatility in the type of software and resources utilized on a server. Each VP server is allocated a specific amount of server resources. This will insure that enough server resources are available for a site to run properly and efficiently. This type of hosting is also useful for fast growing sites, as it has plenty of room to grow with any site or business.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated servers are the next step in the hosting line-up. Many large sites and business need specific hardware and software to run their sites properly and efficiently. A dedicated server is the next step to achieving that. These servers allow many resources to be accessed and utilized for any given site on the server. For most this is all they’ll need to run an efficient web site or business.

Dedicated servers are a leased option, for most users it is the best and most economical way to achieve the type of web hosting service they need or desire. Many of these servers, even the smallest of servers, can handle hundreds of sites at the same time. For users that own more then 5 sites, this is the best answer to space and bandwidth issues.

Co-Location or Collocation

Collocation is basically the same thing as a dedicated server, but the user actually owns the server instead of leasing the server. This allows the owner to install any hardware that may be needed, or specific software before it is shipped off to be housed within a datacenter. Many collocation users live near the data center in which their server is housed, so they can have direct access to their server. This allows for hardware changes and upgrades, along with software upgrades. Most of which can only be done if the server is physically present.
Collocation is for very large and diverse web sites or businesses that require top notch hardware and software that only they can provide. In most cases the user can find better deals and build a server to their likings much cheaper then a pre-built leased server.

What else shall I look for?

Once you know what type of server you want there are a few other things to bare in mind.

Technical Support & Assistance

Technical support and assistance is by far the most important aspect to look at with any hosting company. No matter the type of hosting received, if support isn’t good it’s not worth it. There are a few simple steps to take to find out if a hosting company has good support and service.

First step to take would be to find out what type of support they offer whether by phone, email, or trouble ticket. Also find out when support is available. Most companies will claim to have a 24 hour response time or better. In most cases this is true and there wouldn’t be anything to worry about.

Bandwidth

Each time someone views one of your web pages the HTML, images, flash movies etc have to be transmitted from the web server to the client’s web browser. This is what we mean by data transfer or bandwidth usage. Bandwidth is the amount of information or data that can be sent over a network connection in a given period of time. The less bandwidth you have, the slower your site will take to load, regardless of your visitor’s connection capabilities.

An analogy would be a water pipe where a larger diameter pipe can carry more water per second than a narrow pipe. Bandwidth is usually stated in bits per second (bps), kilobits per second (kbps), or megabits per second (mps).

Burstable bandwidth is where sites are allowed to use bandwidth above the normal network capacity to handle periods of peak usage.

There are web hosting companies that offer Unlimited bandwidth. This sounds like a good deal but it is not. Bandwidth is very expensive. All hosts are limited by their own allocations. To use the pipe analogy again, what happens is each visitor to your site will be given a smaller pipe to transfer the data, creating many tiny pipes therefore making passage “unlimited.” The more visitors you have, the smaller each pipe will be, which makes each visitor wait a little longer for the page to load.

For most web sites you will not need much bandwidth. Probably 99% of all websites use less than 2 GB of bandwidth a month. If you intend to have a lot of downloads of software, audio or video, then you may end up using a lot more bandwidth, maybe 50 GB. The amount of bandwidth you use is also related to the amount of traffic (visitors) that you receive.

Calculate your bandwidth

To work out how much bandwidth you need find out the daily averages of

• Number of visitors/anticipated number of visitors
• Page size, including graphics
• Page views/anticipated page views

Then, multiply them as follows:
Visitors x Page size x Page views x 30 days = Monthly Web site Transfer
If you offer downloads, you should add the following:
Average/Expected downloads x File Size x 30 days = Monthly Download Transfer

Disk Space

This is the amount of actual space available to you for storing your website on the web server hard drive. Web pages (html) are normally very small - on average 40 - 50KB. This means you can store a lot of web pages in a small amount of disk space. Images take up more space then mp3 files and video files taking up more still.

Email Accounts

How many email accounts you can have with the web hosting account.

Server Type

If you have a small website, then it is unlikely that you will need to select a particular type of server for your website. Windows 2000 server web hosting tends to be a little bit more expensive than Linux. If you need to run a Microsoft SQL server database, or use Microsoft Active Server pages then you should choose Windows2000. If you have no clue what these things even are - then you don’t need Windows2000 - you will almost certainly be fine with any type of server.

Other Features like Databases, Server Side Scripting

Web hosting plans can offer a myriad of confusing features. For the small website it is unlikely that you will ever need to know about any of them. If you are a web designer creating complex database driven sites then you will already know what you need. If after creating your site you have never heard of ASP, ColdFusion, SQL Server, mySQL - then chances are that you don’t need to worry about any of these things. If you plan to have a Content Management System with your website you will need a database.

What we offer

Creo have a dedicated server with Hostway.co.uk. We know the purpose and content of all the sites on the server. We do not allow the server to be used for spam or large bandwidth download sites.