Unbiased Step-by-step Guide on Web-Hosting
copyright (c) Pavel Lenshin
No more speeches about importance of your own domain, no
more talks about necessity of having paid hosting. If you
think your brand domain name and stable hosting with a
number of features and absence of ads are not worth, at
least, $50-$150 per year, then you probably want to play
games, rather than build online business.
Choosing hosting provider is something similar to choosing
the place of your off-line office. Despite the fact that it
is as easy to enter the URL and go to web-site that is
physically located in Sidney as in Oslo, the final role here
plays the speed of connection and stability of the hosting
itself.
The problem with hosting comes down to the old statute of
running ebusiness - that is RESEARCH before ACT!
The easiest thing to do online is to pay money, the hardest
is to THINK OVER what I'm paying for! That statement is true
with hosting also because you can pay, let's say, $35
monthly for some particular hosting service, without notice
that in two mouse clicks there is an hosting offer providing
two times better services all for $15 per month only, so you
will keep on losing services as well as $20 monthly that
accumulates up to $240 annually losses as a Fee for not
doing hosting research!
Besides you should keep your eyes open for very good
discounted offers that could save you 30-50% for the first
year of payments.
Phase I - Determining NEEDS
1. Estimate your ebusiness basic requirements: total
web-space needed, monthly bandwidth (approximate traffic
volume multiplied by the most visited web-pages' total size)
and ability to run CGI scripts as a must for every
ebusiness.
If it is content rich web-site and example of your first
year of hosting may look like this:
� 30-50Mb of disc space;
� 500Mb-1Gb of monthly bandwidth;
� cgi-bin to be able to run your own scripts an
offer additional services;
If it is sales web-site, your first year of hosting should
be something similar to these requirements:
� 50-300Mb of disc space depending on how much info
products you are going to sell and therefore upload on your
server;
� 1-3Gb of monthly bandwidth;
� cgi-bin to be able to run your own scripts an
offer additional services;
In particular case with one-two ebooks and three-four pages
sales web-site, 10Mb of storage space with 500Mb of monthly
bandwidth, in general, is more than enough, if you are not
going to expand it, so look closely and examine your
potential but remember: you ALWAYS have a chance to expand,
but you will NOT be able to get your money back if you
overpay for services or web-space you don't need. That is
called efficient ebusiness running.
2. Determine additional services that are necessary or
preferably to have. Consider among them the following:
- Email aliases
- URL Redirects
- Web Mail
- FTP access/ FTP Accounts
- Web control panel
- Graphic statistics
- Custom error pages
- POP3 Accounts
- Sub-domains
- Autoresponders
- Mailing List(s)
- Password protected directories
- MYSQL database(s)
- Perl
- PHP
- SSI
and
- marketing info & support
- promotional help (SE submissions, free banner impressions)
- shopping cart
- chat
- forum
3. Plan your hosting expenses beforehand. Usually the
amount you pay depends on the amount of services you choose,
but not always as there are hosting providers, which offer
identical services for totally different money. The saying
that "You get what you paid for" is not necessarily true,
especially what concerns high profit margins internet
business. Although hosting service is not pure online as it
involves some physical computer systems to be installed,
nevertheless paying more for less is extremely possible. In
other words, know your budget.
Phase II. Selecting the ONLY ONE!
1. Those who start looking for proper place or business
web-site should have one or several possible costs in view
that you knew or met positive feedback about. For now just
make a note of them and put aside, we will come back for
them in the step 3.
2. Now it is time to search among hundreds of offers.
Accomplish your search by filling online forms at:
oolkit/comparehosts.asp allows to
compare 4 hosts simultaneously by entering 4 domain names of
respective web-sites.
I would suggest testing each host twice. First time to check
the response rate of their corporate web-sites, and second
time by comparing speed of their clients' web-site as there
may be a big difference. Just make sure clients are using
approximately the same shared hosting plans.
That is all. By now you should have several options, your
gold, silver and bronze hosting winners. You can go ahead in
setting up your web-site with anyone you prefer more. Don't
lose the rest though, as they may prove to be useful in case
some collision occurs with your present "winner".
Last thing. When your web-site is online, don't just forget
to create additional page for providing your new service -
expert analysis of selecting web-hosting. :0)
