Part 2: How to choose the right web host?

The hosting industries has grown up from few hosting companies to few thousands as of now. Picking the right web host for your website would be important to keep your website up and running for your users. The website is the most critical component for your business if you are on the e-business whereby the website is your online store to generate income for you. In this case, no website = no $$$

Your income will be affected if your users does not have a good experience in accessing your website. Your visitor will go to your competitors if your website is down, slow or does not return a good browsing experience (eg. bad shopping mall).

Lets go back to the main topic, how to choose the right web host for yourself? I will start from the most important to the least important point.

1.Location
Determine the location of your visitors and choose the web host from that place. Why? A closer server to your visitors would usually provide faster website access time due to faster network latency and lesser hops that the data need to travel before it reaches the destination. Try to get an account from your local web host if you know most of the visitors are from your country.

Request a live IP address from the webhost so that you could perform a network test on the connectivity performance from your location. The simplest way would be by doing a "ping" from your command prompt on Windows or Terminal if you are on Linux/Mac. An ideal response time from the server should be <100ms> I am getting 30-40ms response time from my place to the servers.

2. What if some of my users are scatter around the world?
Try to please the bigger and more important group of users

3. Uptime and Reliability
Ask for their uptime guarantee but I believe most of the reply that you will be getting is 99.9%. So forget it, the better chance is to search for a review of the web host in Google. Spend a bit of your time going through the review by independent website. Another good resource would be searching through http://webhostingtalk.com

4. Support response time
Try to send an email to their support address or via a ticket. Check how long do they take to response to you. The faster the reply is, the more points you could give to this host.

If they have live chat support, try to see whether somebody is actually responding from the other side. Some of the web host would put a live chat support option but it would actually return you to a "contact us" form once you click on the live chat option as they do not have a real person behind the chat support.

If the host offer telephone support, try to call and experience it yourself. Try to ask few simple questions and see if they could response to you well.

5. Quality of support response
If you are an IT geek, I believe you would have some questions is mind to test out the support quality. But if this is your first time looking for webhost, you could ask a simple question like, "I need to host my website, how should I proceed?". Check on their response and gauge the quality yourself. Some hosting providers do have very friendly and quality support team while some would have a very "robotic" team.

6. Disk Space
Check how much disk space that you need and choose your plan from there. Again, do not fall prey to unlimited disk space offer easily. Try to walk in to your neighborhood computer store and ask for a "unlimited space hard disk" and you will understand the point. You do not need unlimited disk space to host a 100MB web site. Most unlimited disk space offer comes with the terms and conditions in their fine print. Please read it if you would like to subscribe to one. Most of the hosting plans offer in the market nowadays are more than enough to host a commercial website unless you intend to run a local "youtube" website which I doubt the host will allow it to run.

7. Bandwidth
Same like disk space, choose the amount of bandwidth that you need. As usual, unlimited bandwidth do come with a lot of hidden clauses. Most commercial website would be less likely to hit the bandwidth quota of the lowest plan. Ask the host if you could upgrade to higher plan later on by just topping up the differences.

8. Server Resources
If you know that your website will be getting a lot of traffic, ask them if you could host with them. They might need you to provide them with an estimated number of visitors or the traffic history if you have any. Ask them what is the clause if your website is using more server resources that is allowed. Good hosting provider would usually send you a reminder and give you a grace period to upgrade your account instead of shutting the site down immediately. Usually you would need to pay more if you use more computer resources.

9. Windows or Linux platform?
Go for Windows Hosting if your website contain the following components:-

• ASP
• ASP.NET
• MSSQL
• MS ACCESS
• Cold Fusion
• VB
• VB.NET
• Any components that must run on Windows platform
  

Go for Linux hosting if your website does not have any of the Windows components as listed above. Why? Linux/Unix server does perform better and has better reliability (eg. does not need a reboot after an update).

10. Control Panel and applications vault
Most of the modern hosting control panel comes with a application vault whereby you could install an applications (eg. forum, shopping cart) directly from the control panel. Ask for a demo account from the webhost if you want to try it out.

I will list down some of the popular control panel:

• Cpanel (Linux)
• Direct Admin (Linux)
• Plesk (Linux)
• Plesk (Windows)
• DotNetPanel (Windows)
• HELM (Windows)

From personal experience, my best preference would be Cpanel if I need to host my site on a Linux platform.

11. Price
Work the price out from your allocated budget for a web hosting account. Price is always an important factor but you should realize that you often get what you are paying for. Most of the better host would charge higher but that would not be necessary true. Consider everything from point No. 1 to No. 10 and judge if the price is reasonable.

Part 1: What's the big hoo haa on these unlimited hosting offer?

Let me brief you through a bit on the history of the web hosting industry, web hosting company run a business by leasing you a space to host your email and website with your own domain name (eg. ahbengahlian.com) and the minimum tenure would usually be one year. Web Hosting business was a lucrative and fair business game during the ".com boom" almost a decade back. During that time, most of the provider were playing the game fair and steady. What do I mean by that, they only sell on what they have to offer and the package was pretty straight forward (no hidden clause). The owner of these hosting companies would need to understand and know the system in/out to run the business. Most of the providers at the time were selling the package with the fair and reasonable amount of computer resources (50MB of disk space + 5GB monthly of bandwidth) at an average price of USD50/year.

Over the years, more and more people has ventured into the same business as it is a hidden gem in the IT industry. As these new players does not have a solid company profile to secure the business, what they usually did was lower down the price and offering more specs. This is the usual case for other businesses whereby the new player would usually sell at a lower price. This trend in web hosting businesses has been continuing until now and a lot of the providers are offering ridiculous amount of disk space or unlimited disk space and bandwidth. This is a desperate measures by business owners to secure the business and worry later on the problem that will arise. The name for this practice is "overselling", it means that the business owner is selling more than what they have to sell. Most of the Telco in my country is also practicing overselling. How do I know about this? Because I can't even send a short SMS during festive season!! It took me >3 hours to send an sms and longer to make a phone call. I believe most of you has experienced the same problem as I do. I have subscribed to a 512kb broadband line 4 years back and it is slower than a dial up connection now as they have overloaded the same segment with more users now!

By overselling, hosting providers would put more accounts that the server are able to handle. These providers are hoping there will be only small amount of users in the server will utilize their account. Therefore, the server would work fine if the prediction is right.

What if for example at a festive season, more websites on the same server receive a sudden surge of traffic due to greeting cards sending, online business getting more orders, a bloggers posted new interesting article (eg. The scandal of Tiger Woods) and etc. The server will usually be brought down to its knee together with few hundred websites on the same server at the same time. It will be unfortunate if you are being hosting on the same server. I have personally logged in to the servers of these providers and you won't be surprise that their server resources utilization is >96%.

I have a friend that fell prey for these kind of unscrupulous provider and his blog were suspended without any notice for overloading the server. We went in to check the traffic statistics and it was only receiving about 200 visits day. A switch to a more reputable at triple the price solved his problem even though his blog is receiving triple the amount of traffics.

Part 2: coming soon