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.