Domain Hosting News and Questions

Bill Pratt asked:




As you start out hosting your website, you would often fail to notice a couple of factors which you would have to consider as you choose a web hosting company. Here is a helpful checklist to help you out.

1. Technical Support

This is very important, as it is crucial to be able to have adequate support for any concern that you may have along the way. You could try testing a couple of companies before signing up through shooting them an email message with a question. Check from their response rate if they are able to provide assistance.

2. Uptime

A web host should be able to give a guarantee for more uptime. The acceptable standard is actually a 99 percent uptime.

3. Disk Space

You would have to determine exactly how much disk space you would need. Compute how big you website is and if it would fit the allotted disk space.

4. Bandwidth

This is often overlooked until such point that the limit for the bandwidth has been reached. Remember that if you exceed the allotted bandwidth, you would be getting a hefty bill.

5. CGI Bin

This feature has now been made a standard with the better hosting companies. Without access to this, you would not be able to install programs and scripts.

6. Perl

If you do not have this, you would not be able to run Perl programs. A lot of the good scripts that you purchase are written in Perl.

7. SSL

If you plan to directly accept credit card payments at your website, then you would need SSL or Secure Socket Layer to be included in the plan that you would be getting.

8. SSI

SSI or Server Side Includes would be great if you intend to spend very minimal time in updating your website.

9. MySQL

There are some programs which need a MySQL database to be able to run so you would have to check this feature as well with the plan which you would be choosing.

10. PHP

A lot of new programs and scripts need PHP support. This feature could cost additional but many good hosts have it as a standard feature already.

11. Domain Name

There are some hosting companies which assist you in registering your domain name, however it is advisable to compare prices in the market and study registering your domain name yourself so that you would be in control of the domain name you have if you would be changing hosts later on.

12. FTP Access

Unrestricted and unlimited FTP access to your website is very essential. You would be needing an FTP program to be able to transfer files.

13. Control Panel

This is important to be able to manage your website effortlessly.

14. Statistics Program

An efficient statistics program would come in handy if you plan to keep track on the number of visitors that you are getting, referrers, the top entry and exit pages, as well as where they are coming from.

Web Hosting and Domain Registration

Rick Rouse asked:




Many of the web hosting plans available today claim to offer unlimited disk space and data transfer (also known as bandwidth), but do they really? In a nutshell, yes.

Back in the early days of web hosting, hard drives were relatively small and bandwidth was expensive for the hosting companies to purchase. Therefore, they put strict limits on the amount of those resources that each customer could use every month. But in today’s world massive hard drives are the norm and bandwidth is a lot less expensive thanks to upgrades in the infrastructure of the Internet “backbone”.

This is great news for you because you can now host as many pages, files, images and such as you wish without limitation. There is one caveat however. The amount of strain your site puts on the server is NOT unlimited. If you have a really busy site that makes extensive use of databases and/or server side processing, it will bring a shared server to its knees in a hurry, perhaps even crashing it during peak times.

I host a number of websites on a “Reseller Account” which for all practical purposes is simply a collection of sites running on a shared server. My sites all run very well, even though several of them are pretty large and receive a lot of traffic.

So while disk space and bandwidth are indeed unlimited, you’ll still need to keep an eye on how much CPU and RAM usage your website consumes and consider upgrading to either a VPS or a Dedicated Server at the appropriate time. Until then, just enjoy the low cost of a shared web hosting plan. You can always upgrade later when the need arises.



Expred Domain Search