Choosing the Best Web Hosting:
Web Hosting selection is an important step in creating a website. The entire operation of your website depends on this choice.
Step by Step Guide for Selecting Web Hosting
All hosting providers are divided into two large groups: free web hosts and shared hosts.
First of all, I would like to say that many of the free web hosting providers are not exactly free, that is, in exchange for their services, they can place their ads on your website.
If your website is a home page with your personal information or a small web resource where you share information about a certain topic, free web hosting is probably enough for you.
In the event that your website is an information portal, service or site of your company, you should definitely use services of shared web hosting.
Difference between shared and free web hosting
As mentioned above, very often free web hosts place their advertisements in the form of banners or pop-ups. Visitors to your website will not be happy, because it is well known that advertisements are annoying, especially the pop-up ads.
Therefore, if your goal is to attract the audience that is willing to visit your website regularly, come back time and time again in a day, a week, a month and not just close your source in 5 seconds after reaching from your first page, then choose to host without ads.
Moreover, with free web hosts, you can only expect a domain like your_site.host.com.
Such a domain hardly has a positive influence on the reputation of your website; it is more likely to damage its image, especially if it is the website of a company.
"Why aren't the photos loading?" -SUPPORT-SERVICE gives you answers to such questions. It is imperative to have one because good service support really speeds up the problem-solving process.
90% of the shared web hosting providers have adequate service support and only 10% of the free web hosting providers have one.
Not every free hosting can boast services such as their own CGI-BIN directory or the support of Perl, PHP, MYSQL, Cron, SSH, Telnet and many others.
And even if your web resource does not currently need any of these, such a need may appear in the near future with the growth of your website.
Over time, you also need more and more disk space. Free web hosts usually give you 1-100 Mb, while shared web hosts offer 1-5000 Mb for your website.
So the bottom line is as follows.
If you only have a home page or a small website about your interests, choose a free web hosting without a doubt.
Before you Choose a Particular Web Hosting, you must:
- Determine the disk space volume that you will need, taking into account the further growth of your source;
- Decide if you need scripting support, if you need a file manager, if you're doing fine with FTP access, or if you need a site generator to think about the domain name. It must be short and easy to remember.
- Define your attitude towards host ads: whether you are against it or not
When you are done with all these things, delete all hosts that do not meet your requirements. I would advise you to view the loading speed of websites at hosting providers that meet your needs. And then you just choose the host with the least busy channels.
I personally recommend freehostia.com.
They offer:
250 MB disk space
6 GB bandwidth
5 hosted domains
+ 1 MySQL database
+ 1 click on App Installations
FTP access. Support for PHP, Perl, Python, SSI and more. There is also a catalogue of ready-made scripts with an option to adapt the design to your website - the optimal choice for a starting webmaster.
Shared Hosting
Some may say that shared hosting is expensive, but it's just a myth. The prices vary from 1 to 50 dollars per month, depending on the services and resources provided. Of course, shared hosting does not have the disadvantages of free.
Nevertheless, shared web hosting providers differ depending on the range and quality of the services. Here are some criteria that will help you choose your shared web host:
A host may not impose heavy restrictions on traffic. At least there must be a possibility to pay if you exceed the limit, but the wage may not be too high.
If you need ASP, FrontPage Server, MSSQL, you must be looking for a web hosting on the NT server and the host itself must offer these services. Otherwise, you would opt for UNIX hosting.
It is desirable that a host provides Perl, SSI, PHP, MYSQL ...
Apart from disk space, a host must provide e-mail. Make sure it includes the incoming and outgoing e-mail. Sometimes it happens so that a host gives you e-mail addresses and not e-mail boxes. In this case, all your e-mail will be redirected to the e-mail box that you specified, which impedes your task.
A hosting provider must have its support service - which operates 24/7 via e-mail and via telephone (fax). Ask them a few questions - a good hosting provider will answer you within 24 hours. If they continue to ignore you, or if there is no support service at all, stay away from such hosts.
View which rights you will exercise for the management of the server. You must have at least FTP access to your catalogue - this allows you to perform the necessary actions when forwarding, editing or deleting files. We recommend that a host has a web interface to work with your server and your account.
If you are an experienced user, it is desirable for a host to provide telnet access - you can work with the provider's computer almost at the same level as your own.
Archiving (backing up) your website daily is also a huge advantage.
Good hosting is fast web hosting. The less busy the servers and channels of the provider - the better. Minimum bandwidth must not be less than Pentium III-800 Mhz with 512 MB RAM
It is good practice for a web hosting provider to have his physical address and some other data
Before you make the final payment, you will be introduced to other users' internet reviews about this host.
It is certainly not a complete list of all criteria according to which one should choose a web hosting provider. But if a host meets all of the above requirements, you can start working with it.