Complete Guide To Hosting - Part 1

Building a Checklist

Before you begin to look for a host for your site, you really need to establish a checklist - a method that you can use to rate and score any host that you're interested in. Of course, before you can assess any service, you'll need to have a good idea about what features you want your future host to offer. This is where a checklist of every feature you're looking for -- and a collection of questions you want to ask -- comes in very handy.

Preparing a checklist before you search for a new host can save you both time and money in the longer term. It forces you to prioritize the various features of your site, which is handy when you have a restricted budget and need to make compromises between features and cost.

This guide has been designed to help you prepare a checklist of features that are tailored to your particular site's needs or expected future potential, regardless of whether you know the type of hosting features you want.

Once you've compiled your checklist, you'll be able to assess much more quickly whether a particular host is suitable for your site. Since many hosts fight for a site owner's attention (and hard-earned cash!), you'll probably find yourself referring to your checklist frequently during your research. But this works both ways - it would be silly to host your site with the first service you came across that matched your criteria, given the vast number of hosts out there. Be discerning.

Rating the Hosts

Once you have put your checklist of features together, you can then use it to help you rate each of the hosts. Exactly how you go about doing this will depend how important each of the features are to you. If you've sorted the features on your checklist in order of importance, then you can simply award points on a sliding scale, 1 point for the least important thing, 2 for the second least important, and so on. Then when you assess each host, award them a point for each feature they offer that's on your checklist, and add them up to reach a final score.

Here are some of the features that I personally look for in a host.

• Support for PHP (least important)
• User Control Panel
• Site Statistics
• Support for ASP and Perl
• Price below £10 a month (most important)

When I visit potential hosts I compare the features available with my checklist. The example scoring system shown above favors the cheapest hosts first (cost is important to me, as mine is a hobby site). If I were seeking hosting for a business site, then the cost obviously wouldn't be so important, as the quality of the service itself would in this case be the critical element. But whatever bases you use to rate each host, the one that offers the most of the features you want will achieve a higher score.

The sliding scale is probably the easiest way to convert your checklist into a score or rating, but it is by no means the only way. If you have two or more features that are equally important, then you can give them all the same score. However you use the checklist, it's sure to make the process of host assessment easier.

Remember, you get what you pay for.

It's a sad but true fact of life that many of us have very small hosting budgets. While there are hosts out there that can offer a rather tempting deal at pocket money prices, don't expect these hosts to offer the kinds of guarantees that come with similar but more costly packages. If your site is going to be important to your business or livelihood, do yourself a favor and look upon your hosting as an investment rather than an expense. The extra cash helps to pay for things like infrastructure, back ups and security, so if anything does go wrong you'll be in a better position to do something about it.

A checklist is a good way to sort out which hosts are most likely to offer the kind of hosting you want, but there really is no substitute for doing that extra bit of research in newsgroups and on message boards once you have your potential host short list. The people who will know best how a host performs will be the customers themselves, and unfortunately they can be quite hard to track down at times. Having said that, it shouldn't be too hard to identify hosts you should avoid, as most unhappy customers like to share their experiences with likeminded individuals.

For more information, visit Web Hosting Talk - it's a good place to find out about hosts and ask customers for recommendations.