What to look for in a
Web Site Host Company

When you decide to take your business online, you will need to do several important things. One of these things is to find and secure reliable web site hosting.
Choosing a good hosting service is important to your budget, your peace of mind and the funtionality of your site. If you do an online search you will see that there are millions of hosting services, offering all kinds hostingpackages, with many features and many price points.

How do you decide which one to choose? Here are a few tips to get you pointed in the right direction

Space, Bandwidth and Access

When you purchase hosting, you are really buying space on the web host's server computers. Look for at least 300 mega bytes of storage. This will give you more than enough to host your small catalogue site or business card site. An Ecommerce site may need more storage than this depending on the size of the store.

Bandwidth (also known as throughput or data transfer) is the amount of data you are allowed to transmit to your site. Bandwidth normally includes all activity on your site, whether it is visitors clicking, search engine spiders and bots and your FTP activity. Bandwidth use is affected by the size of the files being moved (transferred, uploaded, requested or viewed).Large, heavily used files will eat up your throughput allotment quickly. Once you use up your monthly allowance, your host may bill you for overages or disable your site for abuse. Be sure that you are getting a healthy amount of throughput allowance. Six (6) giga bytes is a good starting point.

You will also need to have access to your server to do things like setup or change email setting, update passwords and set up directories. There are special web based server interfaces available to let you carry out these task. Plesk, "Helm and cPanel are a few of these server software. Be sure your host offer server interface features. These software will improve your productivity as you will not be waiting for tech support to do minor changes to your site.

Email accounts and settings

Your web site hosting service should offer you at least two (2) email accounts one for your own personal use(you@yourdomain.com) and one for your business (contactus@yourdomain.com). Most service providers will offer more. And the more the better. Having multiple email addresses will allow you to set up an affective filter system in your email reader (example:Outlook Express.). You should also look for a service that offers web based email system. A web based email system will allow you to login in anywhere and access your email anywhere. Another must have service is a Spam filter. Filtering or marking email as spam before it gets to you inbox will save you a lot of hassle.

Scripting, Technologies and Languages

In order to make your web site interactive (collect email in forms) or to use other types of software not offered by your service provider you will need to have the following options available:

1. PHP Language
2. Perl Language and CGI-Bin access
3. SSI. This set of commands lets you dynamically generate pages through server processing.
4. Front Page Extensions for using Microsoft Frontpage Software.
5. MySQL database support. Needed for many things like shopping carts and blogs.

Most servers will have these available. But some hosts will charge more for the privilege. Also be aware that some types of files may not be allowed. Try to find a host that does not have a file type restriction.

Equipment and Redundancy

Beyond what's available on the server is the equipment that make up the server itself. As a machine, you want the most powerful and reliable you can find. Look for servers that offer minimum a Pentium 4 or equivalent processor. Anything else is too out dated to power today's high performance sites. Look for a redundant backup power supply. If there should be a power failure you want your server to have it's own generator or battery backup.

Multiple Backbones and Connections

An Internet Backbone is, in short, the largest of all the internet service providers. Backbones provide connections to all internet service providers national or globally. What does this mean to you? Your hosting service provider should have connections to multiple backbones. If one connection should fail, then your host can route your data through a separate connection. Ensuring that your site is never unavailable.

Security and secure facilities

Finally, every service provider should have a secure data center. the building where the servers are housed should have twenty four hour security personnel, specialized fire protection equipment and alarm systems.

Now that you've read this brief overview, print out our Web Host Evaluation Check List Sheet. This sheet is a handy guide in list format.