Determining Your Web Hosting Requirements
There are a lot of specifications you want to look for before you go and open a web hosting account. Let’s look at the major things to consider.
The Amount of Space
Does it have enough space for your needs? If you envisage that you will expand your site eventually, you might want to cater for future expansion. Most sites use less than 50MB of web space. If you plan on hosting large files such as high definition images, videos, music files, Flash animations, etc. then go for a larger hosting space. You might also wanna check if you can easily upgrade your hosting plan in case you need it.
FTP Access
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) allows you to update your site and uploads files to your web server. While you may be able to use some sort of web-based file manager, chances are you will need FTP someday or another.
Reliability and Speed of Access
This is extremely important. A site that is frequently down will lose a lot of visitors. If someone finds your site on the search engine, and he tries to access it but find that it is down, he’ll simply go down the list to find another site. Slow access is also very frustrating for visitors (and for you too, when you upload to your site). How do you know if a host is reliable or fast? If you can’t get feedback from anyone, one way is to try it out yourself over a period of time, both during peak as well as non-peak hours.
CGI-BIN / PHP support
This one has to be taken in consideration for shared hosting accounts only. CGI’s and PHP are programming languages that allow you to create dynamic web pages and query databases.
Database Server
Make sure your hosting service allows you to use databases (if you need some of course). Check out for the type of database server they are offering : MSSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.
Traffic and Bandwidth
This is the amount of data that can be transfered from and to your server on a monthly basis. Web sites serving larges files such as videos and music may take up to 1000Gb of bandwidth a month! Usually for a text-content site, 500Mb to 1Gb a month is enough.
On a sidenote, don’t believe hosting providers offering “unlimited bandwidth”. You will get charged, believe me.
Technical Support
Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (often abbreviated 24/7), all year around? Just because they say they offer 24/7 support doesn’t mean it’s always good support 24 hours a day. Test them out and email them at 1:00am and see how long they take to respond. You will be surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times.
SSL (Secure Server) and Shopping Carts
If you plan on running some kind of online business and accept payments, make sure your web hosting plan has SSL in order to handle secure transactions. You might also appreciate it if your service provider already has a shopping cart available.
Control Panel
This is called various names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and at the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account. I would not go for a host where I have to go through their technical support each time I want to change a password or add/delete an email account.
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