A lot of attention and effort is directed at making a website achieve the balance between form and function, in other words does your website look wonderful while at the same time being easy to use. A lot less attention generally goes into choosing the company that will host your website and this could be detrimental to achieving your online objectives. Often the over-riding factor is the price that you will pay for your hosting but as with so many things in life cheap does not always equate to best or best value. Below I will give you a number of issues to consider when deciding on who can host your website.
Disk Space
The first thing that you need to consider is how much disk space (also known as webspace) you will have available to you. Many websites use under 5 MB, but think about the type of media that you will want to use on your site. Do you want to have lots of graphics or video footage, these will all eat into your disk space and the last thing you want is to have a website that is flourishing but does not have the room to expand. You might have a successful online business selling various goods to the public but when you try to add new product ranges you find that you cannot add the images that you would like to use because you have no more disk space to use. Hosting companies will normally allow you to purchase extra disk space but this will obviously be an extra cost. As a rule of thumb take a look at the total MB of the images (optimised for viewing over the web) that you want to use and double it, if the company you are looking at cannot provide this then look for another hosting company.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data that is transferred from your website to your website visitors and also includes the amount of data that you have uploaded to your website. Add these two figures together and you have the amount of bandwidth that your website has used in a given period.
Bandwidth is usually measured in either MB’s or GB’s and you must ensure that you have enough bandwidth to serve your visitors desires or you may find that you are paying higher fees for the extra bandwidth or perhaps even worse you find that your website is shut down.
An average website will use less than 250 MB’s of bandwidth in a month.
Server Type
Servers basically come in two flavours Windows and Linux. What’s the difference? In terms of whether one is better than the other there is no definitive answer. Windows and Linux are two operating systems. Windows, as you probably are already aware is provided by Microsoft and costs money to install while Linux is Open Source software. Open Source means that it has been developed by collaboration and all work carried out to develop it is done so free of charge. So the first major difference between a Windows and Linux server may well be price. However, many hosting companies charge the same amount for a Linux server as for a Windows server. The next difference between the two is the type of software that you would like to run on your site. If your site is going to be interactive, i.e. the site responds to information the user supplies and you want to use Active Server Pages (ASP) or .Net pages then you will have to host of a Windows website. PHP pages can achieve the same results as the ASP and .Net but is open source. PHP can run on either a Windows or Linux server.
Database
Does your site require a database? If the answer is yes then you have two real choices, SQL or MySQL. Once again one of these products is a Microsoft product and the other is Open Source. Both products are extremely robust and will be able to handle heavy traffic to your site. If you are thinking about using Access for your website I would tend to advise you not to bother. Access is a perfectly good database but where it falls down is the number of users that can access it simultaneously. Microsoft do not post hard numbers on this, but it is reckoned that anything over than 12 users of an Access database at the same time is likely to cause it, and therefore your site, to crash.
Email Accounts
Another factor to take into consideration is the number of email accounts that you will receive when you sign up to your new website package. You must ensure that you will be able to have enough accounts for your needs. You might also want to consider the resources that each email account will have and how you will access them. If you are planning on using some form of webmail (that is accessing your emails through a web browser rather than through a dedicated mail program like Outlook) to access your emails then you will need plenty of space on the server to store your emails.
In addition you might want to consider how important it is to be kept informed of developments when you are away from your desk. Using Push technology you can have emails routed straight to your phone. While typing this I have received a couple of mails on my phone and then a few seconds later they have arrived on my PC.
FTP Access
You may need to be able to gain access to your webspace in order to be able to upload web pages, images, documents or other forms of site content. The usual way of doing this is to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol). If you do need FTP access make sure that your host will allow it and also check whether they will give you access to the root directory of your web space.
Domain Name Services
Will your host allow you to host multiple domains under the same account? For example you may have a .co.uk and a .com domain, you want the .com domain to alias (point to) the .co.uk website will your hosting company allow this and if so will they charge you anything extra?
As you can see choosing the host is not as simple as it may at first seem. Make sure that before you start looking for a host you first of all know what you are looking for in a host. Not all hosts are the same and errors made choosing a host could prove costly both in terms of the quality of the service that you are offering to your potential customers and even more so if you have to lose your site for a few days while you transfer to a more suitable host.