Choosing a website hosting provider

A reliable Web hosting provider is vital for the success of your shareware business. You must rely on them for your website's availability on the Internet. In this article we'll show you how you can search for and choose a hosting provider that meets your requirements by looking at key factors.

In order to acquaint yourself with hosting providers, start searching for relevant information using newsgroup search engines so you can read other people's first hand experiences. As a second source of information, you may also like to contact hosting providers directly and obtain details about the services they offer.

Once you've gathered a list of possible hosting providers, you're ready to assess whether they meet your specific requirements by focusing on several key criteria:

1. Reliability of equipment

The availability of a website usually comes down to the quality and reliability of the hosting provider's equipment. Keep in mind that websites are bound to be unavailable momentarily at some stage in order for routine server maintenance and software upgrades to be performed. However, choosing a reliable hosting provider will ensure down-time is kept to a minimum. The newsgroup posts you looked at earlier are an excellent source of information in this regard.

A website which is rarely "down" avoids the risk of losing visitors who may not return if a site is unreliable.

Some Web hosting providers, such as Multimedia Australia's Hosting Reliance division, even offer 99.9% uptime guarantees.

2. Speed and geographic location

A good way to evaluate download speeds offered by hosting providers is to look at websites they currently host and note their download speed, taking into consideration the amount of data being downloaded in each case. In order to find websites hosted by a hosting provider, use your newsgroup research as a guide.

Since the physical location of servers will play a role in download speeds, you may wish to consider hosting your site at a hosting provider located close to where you expect most visitors to reside. Whether this is in a particular city, or even a different country, you may find that performance for your visitors is enhanced considerably because data being transferred does not need to travel as far. This is especially the case for websites where large amounts of data is transferred.

3. Technical support and maintenance services

It is advisable to choose a hosting provider that offers 24 hour technical support and maintenance services with fast response times. Such services are indispensable in the event something should ever go wrong with your site. Ensure that these services are provided free of charge, as having to pay for them can prove costly in the long run.

4. Shared or dedicated hosting

Hosting providers generally offer multiple hosting plans to choose from. The two most common ones are shared and dedicated plans.

Shared hosting plans involve hosting a site alongside several others on the same server. All sites on the server share the computer's resources, including the processor, memory and hard disk space. This means that performance may potentially be reduced, particularly if one of the sites processes large amounts of data.

Although there may be a slight reduction in performance, shared hosting plans usually mean less cost to you. They are a perfect choice for the average small business or personal website.

Dedicated hosting is another option commonly selected. These plans provide a stand-alone server exclusively for the use of your site. Unlike shared hosting plans, the server's entire resources are dedicated to your site.

Dedicated hosting plans often give the choice to either rent a server or supply your own. In either case, you should investigate any costs that may apply for equipment to be maintained. If supplying your own server, inquire about any fees that may apply if you physically want to access the server yourself.

Dedicated hosting plans are ideal for websites that receive a large number of visitors, or have high bandwidth requirements. Such plans, however, come at a higher cost compared to shared hosting plans.

5. Bandwidth

As well as referring to the amount of data that can be sent through equipment at any given time, the term "bandwidth" also refers to the total amount of data that can be transferred to and from your site (usually calculated on a monthly basis).

The amount of bandwidth allocated to your site is an important consideration. If your site happens to exceed its bandwidth allocation, a hosting provider may charge you for excess data transferred, or alternatively, temporarily take your site offline for the remainder of the billing period.

As a shareware publisher, your bandwidth requirements might be quite high, particularly if your software's files are large in size and attract many downloads. Bandwidth requirements may vary significantly from one shareware author to another. The websites of some shareware authors may only require a few gigabytes of bandwidth each month, while other authors may require several hundred gigabytes (or even several terabytes). Unfortunately, it isn't always possible to determine how much bandwidth your site will require until it actually goes live. Again, your choice of shared or dedicated hosting plan will need to be taken into account when making this decision.

6. Disk storage space

Assessing the disk storage requirements of your site is much easier than assessing its bandwidth requirements, particularly once you have completed your site and you've finished developing your first software program(s), and can therefore establish your website's exact size on disk. When choosing a hosting plan that meets your site's disk space requirements, remember that you will also need to take into account email storage space, as well as leaving sufficient room for future site expansions, especially if you plan to offer new software programs in the future. Also note that in some cases, a portion of allocated disk will also contribute to files used by the server.

7. Additional services

Most hosting plans come with additional services, which are well worth taking into consideration when making your final decision. The most common services are mentioned below:

Email: Email accounts are offered with most hosting accounts. Remember that you may need several mail boxes for all your staff. Some hosting providers also offer Web-based email in addition to standard access using an email client, which can be beneficial if you are frequently away from your computer.
Web-Based File Access: In addition to uploading your files using an FTP client, such as DigitalAccess, some hosting providers will also offer Web-based file access, which can be convenient when you may be away from the office and need to make updates to your site remotely.
Log Files and Statistics: The supply of log files and statistics regarding site traffic can help you obtain valuable information about what visitors do on your site. Error logs can help you track down missing files that return ‘File Not Found' errors to visitors.
PHP, ASP, CGI and MySQL: Having access to advanced scripting and database functionality gives you increased versatility in designing your site. You can, for example, include contact forms within webpages or operate discussion forums.

Hosting Reliance

Multimedia Australia offers its own Web hosting service called Hosting Reliance. You can visit Hosting Reliance's website at www.hostingreliance.com.

The above article is based on 'Choosing a website hosting provider', published on our WebsiteBytes.com site. The original version is available at http://www.websitebytes.com/ar02072004webhosting.html.

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Last Revised: 22 February 2006
First Published: 02 July 2004