Choosing Hosts
Listed In Server Operation » General Practice — Viewing Full TutorialThis guide will help you choose your perfect host.
Try not to host with far-far-away datacentres.
Instead, you should consider who your audience is and which country they come from. For example, if you're designing a site about your local football team and you lived in England, you wouldn't want to buy hosting from a service provider in America, Australia or Japan. Why? Geographical advantage. Having your site hosted in a datacentre close to you means a faster loading site, and a generally better service all around - not to mention support. If you were in this situation, you would ideally buy off a service provider in the UK - for example - London. If this is too pricey for you, try a webhost in Europe (The Netherlands and France are good picks).
Never go for so-cheap-its-silly prices.
If you see giant amounts of webspace and bandwidth with so called "24/7 support" for only £1/month, or even worse (and hilarious), £10/year, you're entering a bad hosting site. These people generally are out to make quick cash, and chances are that they don't know how to administrate servers, have little knowledge about web hosting or customer services, and their server is most likely hosted in a US datacentre with a low spec. Never be tempted by these low prices, because the chances are they won't be staying up for more than a month. A decent price for a small hosting package is around £2.50-£3.50 a month.
Always check the host's uptime and loadtime.
Most reputable webhosts have uptime indicators on their site, which are monitored externally. Saying that they have 99.999999% uptime is one thing, but the external monitors are another: they provide the truth. Most external monitors also have loadtime trackers as well, which can come in handy when seeing how fast sites load. Anything between 100-125ms is reasonable, anything around 150-175ms is a red light. Loadtime is influenced by geographical location, so don't be surprised if you're testing a server in California when you're in London and the loadtime is 150ms. If pages load slowly on the main hosting website, it's another signal that it's time to move on. Most reputable webhosts should have something between 95% and 99% uptime. You won't see 100% uptime on any hosts that are for real, because of the occasional server reboot (remember - they're computers as well, and need to restart every now and then).
Is the company legitimate?
Well, the chances are if you're talking to a 13 year old kid who doesn't use proper grammar, the answer is no. Though it isn't anything too important, you should check that they have a Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy. These two documents will come into play when you start paying for hosting or wish to cancel, because they dictate the refunds and so on. They should also state whether they give refunds or not. Here's a hint: If they're reluctant to give refunds, don't trust them too much. If the company claims it's registered with the UK companies house or their native company department, ask for the company number and the VAT number to verify that they're legit. If they're not, don't think about buying hosting from them.
Appearences can be deceiving.
Even if their website has a flash banner, is exactly 700px wide, has lots of stock photos with smiley faces on them and sounds when you mouseover navigation buttons, they might not live up to their "amazing" website design. A lot of these templates are on sale from places like TemplateMonster.com. Decent hosts should have their own designed website, with content that was written by them, and not a template builder.
Always ask questions.
If you seem interested in the hosts, you should always try to contact them. By having a contact form and link on their website it shows that they're serious about the hosting business. Ask about anything you want to know, and in their reply they should give decent answers to your questions. If the reply is something along the lines of:[quote=Dodgy Host, inc.]Hey,
Yer we offa 50dbs wiv each hosting account. Cud u ask the other questions again in mre detail cuz we don't undastand dem lol.
urs sinserely,
Jon Doe
Dodgy Host, inc. "maekin ur hostin dreemz com tru!1"[/quote]
..or something to that effect, well.. you know what to do..
Do they provide the correct utilities?
If you're using a PHP/MySQL driven website, you should go for Linux hosting. Linux is generally cheaper than any other hosting solution, but its quality is second to none. Good Linux hosts should provide PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, DirectAdmin or cPanel for web control panels, FTP access and backup weekly.
If you're using an ASP website, go for Windows hosting as it's the main platform that supports it. It should provide the same as Linux hosts, but there might be some difference in control panels and so on. Typically, Windows uses Plesk as a web control panel, which is just as powerful as cPanel or Directadmin.
If you're just using normal HTML pages, it's up to you which one you choose, but if most hosts only provide Linux hosting, and since it's cheaper, you should go for that option.
Hosts generally advertise whether they have Linux or Windows hosting. If you're not sure which one to get, or which one they have, you should go and contact them.
Do they offer discounts?
If you don't yet have a domain, you should always check if they have a bundle package with a free domain. A lot of hosts do this, but it doesn't reflect on whether they're that great or not. However, you should be entitled to your own private control panel and shouldn't have to go through them to make changes to your domain. Look through the site and see if you can see any offers with coupon codes you can use at the order system.
Check support.
If the host's support system is one of those freeware ones which look unprofessional and lame, don't expect anything too great from them. Chat systems are nice, but they're only really going to be operated regularly by the giant hosting companies like GoDaddy. Check their average response time; are they helpful?
Tips on finding hosts.
First of all, consult your friends and people who have had hosting experience as both clients and providers. You will be able to get honest opinions, testimonials and advice. Maybe you could get hosted by someone you know that has a decent hosting company? Remember, not all small companies are irreputable - infact some of them are quite good if not better than the giant companies like GoDaddy and Spoonohost.
There are also webhosting directories on the web - http://www.webhosttalk.com being one of them. You can also check out the forums on http://www.sitepoint.com for host talk.
AvengeX Recommends the following people/organizations for hosting:
- Darkmonkey hosts this site. You can contact him through the PM system.
- A Small Orange
- Blue Host
- Server Seed
- Lightning Host
And that's it! If you have anything to say on the tutorial, feel free to comment on it.
