Web
Hosting:
Confused How To Choose a Web Hosting Provider?
SolveYourProblem.com Article Series: Web Site Design
Before you can get a website up and running,
you need to have a place to put it. Paying for web hosting
is, basically, like renting a small amount of space on someone's
server and paying what it costs them to send your web pages
to your customers. Fortunately for you, though, web hosting
has never been cheaper.
Domains and Hosting Together?
Many domain name companies have taken to offering you hosting
when you buy your domain from them. This is generally an expensive
option, and a bad idea – you'll be getting few features compared
to what you're paying. Few people who are serious about web
hosting get it from the same place they get their domains.
So Where Should I Start?
Well, that all depends on what your website is going to need.
How many visitors do you expect to have? Are you going to have
lots of large graphics on the site? Do you have a lot of articles
or products that you want to put in a database? Do you want
to have an email address at your website (yourname@yourdomain.com)?
On and on it goes. Each host you look at will offer you different
combinations of features at different price points, and finding
the one that's right for you can be quite a task.
Here's a
technical-to-English guide to what you should be looking for. MB
storage. The more MB of storage you have, the
more you can put on your website. For most websites, this
number can
be really very small without it being much of a concern – the
pages would be too big for anyone to download and see before
they'd be too big to store. You only really need to worry if
you're planning to put something apart from plain pages on
your site. If you want to make a gallery for your digital photos
or let people download ebooks from you, for example, this number
needs to be higher.
GB
bandwidth per month. This is a limit on how much data your
website can transfer each month.
For small websites, you don't
need to worry too much, but as you get more visitors the
amount you need will increase sharply, especially if each
one looks
at lots of pages or downloads large files from the site.
The amount of bandwidth your site needs is generally considered
to be the deciding factor in how 'big' it is, and how much
it will cost you. MySQL
databases. The number of databases your website will
have to store things in. It will make it much easier for you
if you have one. Don't pay more to get extra, though: one database
is all you need. It's worth noting that if your host may offer
some other kind of SQL instead of MySQL (for example, PostgreSQL).
You should usually avoid anything apart from MySQL, unless
you know what you're doing.
PHP,
Perl, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby. These are all
scripting languages, used to write your website. You should
make sure your host offers the languages that any software
you plan to use is written in. If you don't have specific requirements,
then you should be fine with just Perl and PHP.
Subdomains. These allow you to split your website into more
sections than just 'www' – you might decide, for example, that
you would people to be able to go to 'shop.yourdomain.com'
and 'news.yourdomain.com' and see pages there. You don't really
need these, though, as doing the same thing with subfolders
('www.yourdomain.com/shop') is usually just as effective.
FTP
accounts. An FTP (File Transfer Protocol) account is what
you'll use to upload your website to your host. You'll always
get one of these. The only situation when you'll need more
is if you want to let someone alter things on your site without
giving them the master password.
POP3
accounts. POP stands for 'Post Office Protocol', which
is just fancy-speak for email. The more POP3 accounts you get,
the more email addresses you can have: useful if you want to
have sales@yourdomain.com for new customers and support@yourdomain.com
for existing ones, for example.
#
# # # #
SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
> Home > Website Design Articles: Main Page
|
