What You Need to Know
What are the key issues to consider when choosing a hosting option?
Answering these questions will help you decide your hosting:
- Do you need a domain name?
- How many site visitors do you expect each month?
- How much space, and what access speeds, will you require?
- Will you need e-commerce facilities?
- Will you require any special programming features?
- How do you want to handle email?
- What sort of tech support is offered?
- What are the price and payment options?
What is the most popular and cost-effective hosting approach?
Virtual (shared) hosting. For as little as $20 a month, there are excellent hosting packages that will work well for many small and medium-sized businesses. If, however, you want to add extra functionality, such as e-commerce, the costs begin to rise.
There are so many hosting companies. How do I choose the right one?
If you have quality technical expertise in-house, your tech team will be able to investigate the various options and choose the one that most closely fits your needs. If not, it’s best to choose a larger, better known company that has a good reputation for service.
What to Do
Understand the Basic Hosting Options
- Nonvirtual hosting. This is the most basic option, and is provided free by entities such as Geocities. You do not have your own domain name; instead, your address would be: www.hostingcompany.com/yourname. This sort of package is advisable only for very small businesses. One of its most serious drawbacks is the lack of flexibility: you cannot change your hosting company without changing your Web address.
- Virtual hosting (sometimes known as shared hosting). Your Web site is housed on a network vendor’s server, which is also used by other organizations, a popular and very suitable option for many small to medium-sized businesses. The hosting company agrees to deliver minimum access speeds and data transfer rates, and to perform basic hardware maintenance, but you are responsible for managing the content and software.
- Collocation hosting. Your own servers are placed with a hosting vendor. You manage everything that happens on your servers: content, software, and the hardware itself. The network provider supplies an agreed access speed to the Internet, an agreed amount of data transfer over a specified period, and a minimum level of maintenance and service.
- Managed hosting. The vendor has more responsibility, which can include supplying and managing both the hardware and software for the Web site.
Register Your Domain Name
If you are in business, you should have your own domain name. Keep your domain name as short and memorable as possible. The .com suffix is easy for people to remember, but if your primary markets are outside the U.S., you may want to have a domain name specific to your market (for example, .co.uk for Britain or .ca for Canada). To find out where to register your domain name, see the Google link below.
If you already have a domain name registered and you are setting up a Web site with a hosting company, your domain may be out of service briefly while the site is put into operation.
Determine What Capabilities You Need
Your most critical capabilities are:
- Speed. How quickly your Web site pages download is very important to site visitors. The speed will depend in part on the size of the Web site pages but also on the network speed offered by your hosting company. As a rule, the cheaper the hosting package, the slower the speed. You should also find out if the hosting company has backup capability so your Web site service is not interrupted by technical problems.
- Space. Most Web hosting options provide plenty of disk space. If you think you may have a substantial amount of content, however, talk to your tech team or your vendor about how much disk space your Web site may require.
- Visitor capacity. A hosting company will ask about the number of Web site visitors you expect and how much downloading will be done. For example, if you expect 1,000 visitors a month, and the average visitor will look at four pages, a total of 4,000 pages will be downloaded. If the average size of a page is 50K, that results in a total data transfer of 200,000K, which would be well within the range of most hosting providers.
Determine What Features You Need
There are a number of features you can have on your Web site, which will require additional software and programming and therefore cost more:
- e-commerce functionality
- ability to accept credit card orders (will require a merchant account and additional security)
- email management, including multiple addresses, forwarding, and auto-responders when you or your employees are away from the office
- collection and analysis of data from your Web site
- support for Microsoft FrontPage, if you use this software tool to create your Web site.
Make sure your hosting company has the technical capabilities to meet all of your needs.
Determine Payment Terms
Most hosting packages will require a setup fee. After the setup, some companies require monthly or quarterly payments while others require one year’s payment in advance. In addition to determining payment terms, also ask about the hosting company’s cancellation policy.
Make Sure of Quality Support
Every Web site has technical glitches. The more you depend on your Web site, the more vital it is to have glitches corrected quickly. When you consider a hosting company, look into the company’s reputation for service and ask detailed questions about technical support. It may be worthwhile to pay more to ensure quality support and service.
What to Avoid
You Choose the Cheapest Option
The cheapest option for Web site hosting is rarely the best choice. It is nearly always better to spend a little more to get better infrastructure and support. The more your business depends on your Web site and email, the less you can afford to have them go down for any length of time.
You Fail to Anticipate Future Business Needs
You may not want e-commerce today, but will you want it in six months? Be sure to ask your hosting company if you can add facilities at a later date. Changing hosting companies is a messy and time-consuming process.
Where to Learn More
Books:
Addison, Doug.
Heartfield, John.
MacDonald, Matthew.
Slocombe, Mike.
Web Sites:
Google Directory: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Domain_Names
HostReview.com: www.hostreview.com
WHIR: Web Host Industry Review: www.thewhir.com
