General Web Issues > How to Select a Web Hosting Company
Published: 2005-09-26

Introduction

Selection of a web hosting company, expecially for a novice deploying their initial web site, often follows the old adage, that there is "never time to do it right, but always time to do it over". This article provides a basic perspective on what to look for when selecting a web hosting provider to avoid the need to "do it over".

Initial web site designers are often concerned with the design (look and feel) of the website, and the site's content. While these two elements are critical to establishing a web presence that properly conveys the image of an organization, over time organizations often want to provide additional capabilities on their website. These capabilities can include ecommerce, newsletter subscription management, web based survey management and reporting, membership management, event registration management, etc. Once an organization has a web presence, they will often begin to explore ways that their web site can be used to take on other roles in the management and delivery of their products or services. This article discusses the basic capabilities that organizations should look for in their initial web hosting provider.

Basic web sites are like a marketing brochure, capable of providing potential customers or clients with a firm understanding of the organization's products or services, presented in a way that will entice them to buy. From a web hosting perspective, most web hosting companies can provide the basics to accomplish this.

Windows vs. Linux/Unix

The first thing to consider is the overall choice of platform, Microsoft Windows with Internet Information Services (IIS), or Linux/Unix with Apache. The choice of a web site design package may cause you to believe that you need one system or the other. For example, if you site is being developed using Microsoft Frontpage, you may believe that you must choose Microsoft Windows/IIS as your hosting technology. This is not true, because Linux/Unix hosted sites often come with Front Page extensions that enable them to provide basic support for Front Page active elements such as automated subscription processing. However, many FrontPage enhanced capabilities do require a Windows IIS server to work correctly.

Web sites designed using Macromedia Dreamweaver (Studio MX), or Adobe GoLive are less dependent on FrontPage extensions to provide advanced functionality.

Basic Services

In addition to basic web hosting, most web hosting companies offer a variety of other basic services. These include email services (POP or IMAP), and a control panel to manage the website and email mailboxes and passwords. Design houses that also provide web site hosting capabilities in some cases do not provide a control panel. This means that any time you need to add/delete a mailbox, you must send a request to your web design house to make the necessary changes. This makes periodic review and auditing of the email inboxes especially cumbersome.

The final capability that you should expect from any web hosting company is web statistics reporting. Web sites log the activity on the sites, and a variety of web analysis programs are available to analyze the log files and generate reports on web activity. This will prove valuable in determining what people are looking for, what they are doing on your site, and if there are any pages that have been requested that do not exist, among other things. Find out what analysis software your web hosting provider offers, and see if the capabilities it offers are sufficient for your needs.

Advanced Services

These are the basic capabilities that are available in most web hosting plans, in some form or other. Beyond these basics, there are two other capabilities that will provide your web with needed potential to grow to address your future needs. These are a programming language, also known as a scripting language, and a database.

In the Microsoft world, the programming language is ASP, or ASP.NET, and the database is generally SQL Server. In the Linux/Unix world there is a great deal more variety. The most commonly available scripting languages are PHP and Perl. Also available on higher end hosting plans are Python and Java. The most common database systems in the Linux/Unix world are MySQL and PostgreSQL.

In general the scripting language and the database system are viewed as the two components necessary to build "Dynamic WebSites", i.e. web sites that change based on the contents of a database. However there is one extension that is very popular with websites, that requires the scripting language but does not require a database. This extension is an online web editor.

Online Web Editors

In general, web sites are developed offline and then uploaded using FTP or FrontPage extensions. Using an easy to install component known as a web editor enables web owners to login to the website, and make updates to web pages without using FrontPage or DreamWeaver. The best of these systems uses PHP or Perl. We recommend that our clients choose a web hosting company that at a minimum supports PHP, so they can use the best of these products for day to day maintenance of their website. Contact us at: info@azgaard.com for more information

Web Statistics

That is basically all that is necessary in an initial website. The final consideration is the amount of traffic and email that a site is likely to receive. Some web hosting companies are downright miserly in their allocation of bandwidth and storage to a clients site. Others are more generous.

Price

The final issue is price. Here there is a great deal of disparity. Design firms that also provide hosting services for their clients often charge more for the hosting than a pure web site hosting company. This may be justified if they can provide your with administrative services beyond the support provided by commodity hosting companies. Web site hosting plans can cost as little as $100/year (there are free plans as well, but we haven't found one that didn't compensate for the free part by some other means, such as forced advertising). and as much as $75/month. These prices are for shared hosting plans, where you share the computer hardware with other websites. If you want dedicated hardware, expect to pay many times more. In our experience you should not need to pay more than $25/month for a basic Linux/Unix shared hosting plan, with programming language and database capability. Microsoft Windows based plans often cost slightly more.

Disaster Recovery & Backup

One thing that often gets ignored is information backups. In a basic website, the information is stored on the designers local system, so a backup is not really necessary. But if a web editor is installed, then the changes to the website are not available anywhere other than on the website, so some backup strategy is necessary. This can be an automated backup provided by the hosting company, or your webmaster could download the files to a local storage system periodically. The issue is more complex once you begin to use a database. In this case backup by the hosting company is expecially beneficial, but we also recommend periodic backups to some local storage in case the system needs to be restored in an emergency. We find that when there is a site crash, the hosting companies generally become less responsive because they are busy trying to fix problems for many clients.

Hopefully this overview of web hosting accounts and capabilities has proven useful. If you would like to provide any feedback, or have other questions you would like to see addressed, you can contact us directly at feedback@azgaard.com.