Complete Guide To Hosting - Part 1

One of the most important business relationships for a Website owner (whether the site's for business or pleasure) should be with a Web hosting company.

After all, you pay a host to look after your site -- you should expect them to take good care of it. So it stands to reason then that host selection is important for anyone who manages or runs their own site.

This Guide to Hosting is in two parts. Today we'll:

• look at why it's important to choose the right host,
• review a hosting assessment checklist you can adapt to yur needs, and
• consider the aspects of shared or dedicated hosting, and choosing server software.

Then, in Part 2, we'll explore in detail the basic elements you should consider as you develop your checklist and assess different hosts, including:

• disk space
• email accounts
• FTP Access
• data transfer
• bandwidth
• multimedia support

But first, let's look at why the choice of host for your site is so important.

Saving Face -- and Money!

How your chosen Web host looks after the server that hosts your site will reflect on you as the owner of the site. If the site is frequently unavailable due to unreliable servers, poor server configuration or the server simply being unable to handle the traffic your site receives, this will give your users the impression that you don't really know what you're doing. This is bad enough with hobby sites, but is of particular concern if you run a virtual store, or have potential employers trying to view your online portfolio.

We'd all like to think that once our site's up and running, it'll always be available to everyone who wants to view it, whenever they want to. But as we all know, this certainly isn't the case. There will always be those times when a site you try to visit isn't available for whatever reason. That is, unfortunately, the unpredictable nature of the Internet.

If your site is a business site, it could suffer from the lost opportunities to take orders or enjoy brand exposure, and personal and hobby sites, too, could miss revenue opportunities while they're unavailable. Even not-for-profit sites can get a poor reputation if visitors find them unavailable or slow to use.

While the potential loss of revenue is the most obvious reason for wanting to choose a good host, your decision can often have other ramifications than simply up-time. Quite often a problem with a host can affect the other services associated with your domain. Services such as email and FTP could also be affected, so you might find that while your site's down, you're also unable to check your email. Worse still, email messages could be returned to the sender, giving your visitors the conclusion that the site no longer exists...

Service Level Guarantees

While undoubtedly some downtime will be beyond our control, we can reduce the risks if we choose the host that is most suitable for the needs of the site. Any host worth their salt should inform you of any scheduled downtime before it happens via email, which will allow you to make alternative plans should you need to. Of course there is no way to predict any unscheduled downtime, but many hosts will offer an uptime guarantee that compensates you in some way for any downtime over and above that scheduled. The hosts that are more confident of their levels of service will usually offer better terms of agreement than will their less competent counterparts.

It's one thing to think that you're covered by these up-time guarantees, but quite another when you think you actually have a claim for compensation. It may be an idea to keep both a print and an electronic copy of the Terms of Service and any other important documents from the day that you purchase a new hosting plan, just in case.

Often problems can occur simply because you aren't able to monitor the site yourself 100% of the time. There are, however, products and services that can carry out various tests to check whether your site is live. But even if you can prove that your site was unavailable to you (or to your monitoring service) for more than the agreed acceptable level, you should always check the small print: if the problem wasn't your host's fault, they may not need to pay up!

You get what you pay for!

One thing to remember is that there is a host for every site. My perfect host could be your perfect hosting nightmare! A server that is well suited for one of your sites may slow down another. And there's no right host, so don't even try to visit and assess them all.

Remember, it's in your best interests to find the most suitable host set up for your site that you can afford, otherwise you can easily get a reputation for being unreliable, unresponsive and uncaring.