Choosing a web host is a difficult task. It is a very crowded marketplace, and picking out the right web host for your website can be a minefield. All the web sites look similar – and with the internet as it is, a small, part-time one-man operation can appear to be a large corporation on first glance. This might not be an issue if you have a small hobby website that is critical to the continuity of your business – but it is something to consider if your website is important to you. Another issue to consider is that the larger hosting companies don’t care about you as an individual customer, and the support may well be outsourced.
All of this comes down to research – and to avoid such problems, I would really advise asking for recommendations from people. “blahblahhost.com is the best ever! Five stars!” Be wary of many hosting comparison sites – it has been known for certain web hosts to fabricate reviews and ratings on such sites, and often you’ll find the review sites themselves are earning money for recommending certain hosts due to affiliate schemes. One very good hosting review site, however, is OcHostReview.
Online buddies on forums and other communities can usually help steer you away from the bad providers and towards the good. Once you have a list of recommendations, you need to find out whether those providers actually offer what you need to host your website. Such communities dedicated to web hosting include www.webhostingtalk.com (primarily US centric) and www.webhostchat.co.uk (primarily UK centric). Here you can ask about prospective companies you’re considering going with, as well as read reviews of others you maybe hadn’t considered. A Google search for the company name may also yield some reviews. A lot of people talk about their hosting provider on their personal blog – usually it will be either a glowing recommendation or a complete grilling. That’s not to say that a bad review or report on a web host should mean that you scrub them off your list entirely. Things do go wrong time to time, and even the most well-prepared companies can have hardware failures and the like. The crux of the issue is how they deal with those problems – do they put procedures or steps in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again? To they keep their customers informed? Did they provide any apology or compensation if the downtime was lengthy?
You will be hard-pressed to find a company where nothing has gone wrong ever. Finding a company with a couple of positive reports and nothing negative may not be as good as finding a company with a thousand good reports and a handful of negative; it can give you an indication of the number of customers a company has as well as how long they’ve probably been in business.
What do I need from a hosting package? Most hosting packages are created relatively equally. The standard features included tend to be PHP and MySQL (generally required for running galleries, forums, and blogs like WordPress), a set number of email accounts, and also an amount of disk space and data transfer (sometimes referred to as bandwidth). Disk space is equivalent to the concept of disk space on your home computer. It is an allocated amount of space that you are allowed to use on the web host’s server. It can be anything from 100MB (a small, personal website) right the way up to many gigabytes (a large website featuring a lot of downloadable content, like videos). Data transfer or bandwidth is linked to how many people view, visit or download things from your site. Each time someone views an image on your webspace, that image is sent to their computer and some data transfer usage is incurred. E.g. 100KB image can be downloaded 10,000 times for every 1GB of data transfer your hosting package offers. Bigger isn’t always better, but I’ll leave my article on Overselling to explain that.
