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Website Hosting
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Your first decision will have to be
whether you need a paid or a free web host. With the price of plans
offered by quality hosts falling down to very affordable levels, only the
simplest and less popular sites should consider being hosted by Geocities,
Tripod, or other free hosts. Some major differences are the number of
features offered by paid hosts (like more disk space, access to multiple
programming languages, databases, SSL servers, anon FTP, regular backup,
guaranteed uptime, access to server configuration files like .htaccess and
to raw logs and statistics), the forced ads and pop-ups required by free
web space providers, better financial stability of paid companies, and the
availability of technical support. In short, if you expect to spend more
than couple hours making your web site, go with a paid service.
Your next big decision should be whether to choose an
NT or Unix-based host. Which operating system you decide to use should
depend on what features you need. For example, if you are already using
IIS, ASP, VBScript, Microsoft SQL Server, or Visual InterDev, and you
don't have the time to learn Unix-based solutions, you should choose a
Windows NT or Windows 2000-based host. Linux- and FreeBSD-based operating
systems and Apache Web servers are most common among web hosting companies
because of their good track record of stability and performance and
because they are free. There is usually no need for the operating system
of your computer to match that of your web host. If you use Windows XP on
your home computer, there is no reason you can't use a host that runs its
servers on Linux.
Next, you should calculate how much disk space your
site will need. A vast majority of sites that don't have tons of
graphics, sound and video clips or downloadable files easily fit in 50 MB
of disk space. You should always leave yourself some room for growth or
check if the host has a bigger plan in case you need to upgrade.
Your next calculation should be how much data
transfer you will need. You can estimate your needs by looking at your
average page size (including graphics!) and multiplying it by the number
of page views you expect to have in a month. For example with an average
page size of 50 KB, and around 2000 page views per day, you will transfer
an average of 3 GB per month. You should get a plan with 4 to 5 GB of
data transfer limit per month, so you don't have to worry about
overstepping your account's limit, which may cause extra per GB transfer
charges. If your calculations or your previous experience show that you
can expect over 50 GB in transfer per month, you should look into getting
a dedicated server.
Some hosts advertise unlimited or unmetered
accounts. This is usually just a gimmick and you should know that you
can't expect them to host your site if they would lose a lot of money on
it. Most web hosts pay from $1 to $5 per GB of transfer. Almost all
hosts that have "unlimited" plans, specify in their Acceptable Use
Policies that no site can use an "excessive" amount of resources. If you
use too much disk space, bandwidth, or CPU time, these "unlimited" hosts
will ask you to upgrade or leave. So be careful with them check before
you get an account, if the transfer usage you expect to have is
acceptable.
Next, you should figure out what server-side
languages you'll require. Using server-side languages is necessary if you
want to be able to create a dynamic site. Even if you don't actually know
or want to know how to program in these languages, you should know which
ones you'll need, if you want to use ready-made scripts available for free
or for a fee on the Web. Perl is the most popular scripting language, but
others like PHP are quickly gaining popularity. NT-based plans usually
offer ASP (Active Server Pages), for which you can develop in VBScript,
JScript, or PerlScript and sometimes they offer ColdFusion. Other
programming languages offered by some hosts are JSP, Tcl, Python, server
JavaScript, Miva Empressa, and even compiled C/C++.
If your site will store a lot of data that should be
dynamically accessible (like user accounts, stock prices, maps), you'll
probably need to look for an account that offers a database. Most
NT-based plans will offer Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL Server, and
most Unix-based plans will offer mSQL, MySQL, or PostgreSQL. All of them
are relational databases. MS SQL Server is much more powerful than
Access. MySql and PostgreSQL are more powerful than mSQL.
If you are new to Web hosting and you don't want to
use email for technical support, you may want to look for a host that has
a phone technical support or even 24x7 toll-free phone technical support.
However, you should expect to pay extra for this feature. Almost all
problems can be resolved by email or by live chat on a computer.
Increasing number of hosts provide live technical support using AOL IM,
ICQ, or HumanClick.
Extra features that may be important to you are:
- SSL servers for secure over-the-Web transactions
(you'll also need a digital certificate), shell (telnet or SSH) access
to your account,
- access to raw logs and stats for figuring out who
the visitors to your site are,
- streaming media support for letting your users
listen to audio or watch video without having to fully download it,
- email accounts so your users can contact you@yourserver.com,
mailing lists for creating an email community around your site,
- whether the host uses a static IP,
- the prices for additional transfer and space so
you don't pay a fortune for going over your plan's limits,
- sub-domains for creating sub-sections to your
site without having to use directories in URLs,
- control panel for graphical access to your
account settings,
- anonymous FTP to allow users to download files
through FTP,
- guaranteed uptime if you want a refund for times
when your host is down (no host stays up 100% of the time),
- a money back guarantee.
Have a look at some prices and web hosting packages
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