When you start looking for a company to host your business or personal website there is always an element of worry. When you consider a business owner is putting his or her lively hood in someone elses hands you have a right to be worried.

The 3 main types of hosting companies:

Stack it high sell it cheap:

These types of hosting companies will sometimes offer prices that seem too good to be true. Whilst some low cost hosting can be a bargain the majority will always require paying extra. This sort of company also has little or no support and the reliability of the service they supply leaves a lot to be desired.

The sell it cheap hosting company is ideal for the home user that needs a web presence.

Small Independent good value:

These types of hosting companies usually give a much better customer service than both the cheap and large hosting companies. Small Independent hosting companies generally give a better service as they don’t over fill there servers. If you’re a small business and you like the idea of being able to speak to someone when a problem arises then the independent hosting company is for you.

Large international hosting companies:

These are the big boys in the hosting industry, with years of trading behind them and thousands of customers they run a very tight ship. Generally the large hosting company offer good value for money but 9/10 lack an real support. Trying to speak to them on the phone is almost impossible and support tickets are normally answered with 24 hours (if your lucky) If you looking for value for money and don’t need too much support then try a large hosting company.

Hosting features explained:

Nearly every hosting company in business today offers some sort of control panel. A control panel makes it easy for you do advanced stuff without requiring any previous knowledge. Listed below are some of the features a hosting account may include:

Email accounts: If you run a business you will almost certainly require more than one email account. This would allow you to give each user or department there own email address. Each user would then have access to there own email via Outlook (or similar).
Email Auto-Reponders: Email Auto Responders are the perfect solution for users that are unavailable for a period of time. An auto responder can be setup for a specific email address and will automatically respond to all emails with a customised message.
Webmail: Webmail allows you to send and receive your email from any internet connected PC.
FTP accounts: FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. FTP is the most widely used method for transferring data between two PC's. FTP makes it easy for you to upload or download files to your hosting account for use on your website. The amount of FTP accounts you need depends solely on the amount of people that need access to your site. If you run a business and only two people develop your site then three FTP accounts would be sufficient. You should keep a spare account in case you use a freelance or external developer that might need access.
PHP: PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side programming language extensively used for web scripts and to process data passed via the Common Gateway Interface from HTML forms etc.
PHP can be written as scripts that reside on the server and can produce HTML output that downloads to the web browser. Alternatively, PHP can be embedded within HTML pages that are then saved with a .php file extension. The PHP sections of the page are then parsed by the PHP engine on the server and the PHP code stripped out before the page is downloaded to the web browser.
Perl: Practical Extraction and Reporting Language is an open source server side programming language extensively used for web scripts and to process data passed via the Common Gateway Interface from HTML forms etc. Perl scripts are not embedded within HTML pages and do not download to the web browser but reside on the server. They execute by being triggered from commands within HTML pages or other scripts and may produce HTML output that does download to the web browser.
CGI-Access: CGI Access allows you utilise a directory called CGI-bin. This a special directory which can contain scripts to run on your website.
The only scripts that need to be run from the cgi-bin are Perl. (PHP scripts can be run from anywhere). Perl is a self-compiled language which can be run immediately after uploading with no need to compile. Many free Perl scripts are available for download on the internet, these can be used to create dynamic websites. Advanced users can also use Perl to access a MySQL database.
Spam & Virus Protection: Viruses and Spam are one the internets biggest annoyances. Viruses can cause dataloss or personal data theft, while Spam can overload a mailbox making it impossible to distinguish genuine mail from junk. Luckily all most hosting packages come with Virus & Spam protection as standard. Viruses are eliminated at source so they never reach your mailbox, whereas Spam is tagged for filtering in your email client. You can create white & black lists for email addresses that are known. Genuine (White) email addresses are accepted, whilst email addresses in your black list are automatically rejected. You can also perform virus scans on all files in your account, so if you allow users to upload files these can be automatically dealt with before they can cause any danger.
mySQL databases: MySQL (pronounced "my ess cue el") is an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the most popular language for adding, accessing, and processing data in a database. Because it is open source, anyone can download MySQL and tailor it to their needs in accordance with the general public license.
MySQL is noted mainly for its speed, reliability, and flexibility. Most agree, however, that it works best when managing content and not executing transactions.
Sub domain: Some hosting packages include sub domains, a sub domain can be created as an addition to your existing domain name. For instance, if your sites domain is: example.com then you could create a sub domain which might look like this: shop.example.com. Sub domains can be setup to point to any folder in your hosting account. Sub domains also offer an excellent way of tracking advertising revenue, for instance you could create a sub domain: google.example.com, this would allow you to track all traffic from the Google search engine.
SSL certificate: An SSL certificate is installed on a secure server. It is used to identify the merchant using it and to encrypt and transmit credit card, and other sensitive data over the internet.
Graphical Statistics: For monitoring activity on your website most hosting packages allow have access to a utility called Webalizer. Webalizer is a fast log file analysis program. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser.

Bandwidth explained:

One of the most common concerns people have when deciding to host a web site is figuring out how much bandwidth they'll need. Get too little bandwidth and you could pay a lot more in over excess fees. Get too much and you're paying for bandwidth that you don't really need. The following is a helpful guide to determine the amount of bandwidth that is right for your web site.

Every time someone views a web page or downloads a file, bandwidth is used, also known as data transfer. How much is used depends on the size of the page or file that is being viewed or downloaded. Essentially, the amount of bandwidth that your web site will need depends on two key factors:

(1) Web site content and file size
(2) Web site traffic/popularity.

Let's look at a few web site examples to get an idea of what their bandwidth requirements might be and why?

Let's start with web sites that have high-bandwidth requirements. If you have a web site that has large-sized content and gets thousands of hits a day, you're going to need a lot of bandwidth. If your site contains video clips, file downloads, or large images you will need lots of bandwidth.

Simply viewing the pages uses a lot of bandwidth, and of course downloading a video clip uses a even more. Combine this with the fact that a web sites probably gets tens of thousands of visitors per day and you can see that its bandwidth requirements are quite extensive.

At the other end of the spectrum we have low-bandwidth web sites. A good example is a personal homepage. Most personal websites contain some text about the author as well as a few images. The site might receive 100 hits a day but this still means the bandwidth usage is relatively low.

The average web site contains a mix of text and images throughout its pages, and may or may not offer files for download. Also the average website can get anywhere from 50-500 visitors per day. Assuming these factors, a hosting plan with anywhere from 3-5 gigabytes (GB) of data transfer per month should suffice. For sites that get more than 500 visitors per day, or those that offer numerous large files for download, may be wise to purchase a hosting package with 10 gigabytes of data transfer per month, or more.

Diskspace Usage:

Disk space usage on your website is the same as on your home PC. The main difference is your space allocation only needs to hold your website files, databases and emails.

Your disk space requirements will be completely different to that on your home PC because of the nature of the internet. All of the files that your website visitors access will need to be as small as possible, this is to ensure fast delivery.
That said, there are times where you may need to offer large image files, PDF files, or Video clips for download. These types of files can be extremely large and will easily use a large chunk of your disk space.

For the majority of websites with an average page count of around 1000, a mySQL database and a frequent flow of emails, around 500 Megabytes of space should be sufficient.

With more and more dynamic websites using a scripting language like PHP, Perl and a backend database, the requirements have increased somewhat.

As a general rule, if you run a dynamic site that collects user data, you should allow yourself at least 500 megabytes of spare disk space.

When your looking for a host do some research, ask others for recommendations. Once you've found a company phone them, if they can't be bothered to answer a sales call what chance have you got if you need help. Try not to get locked in to a year or 2 year deal, take out a monthly deal for the first few months and if all goes well then sign up for a longer period.

Remember a lot of the small independent companies will be more willing to work with you if you have a problem or specific requirements, they will also be more flexible with the facilities they offer.

I hope this guide helps you. Good Luck!

Neil Westlake