Web Hosting Considerations for an Effective Site

I’ve been casually looking at various web hosting providers, trying to sort out my hosting options. Perhaps you have an idea for a web site, or a site that’s outgrown its current host, but you’re not sure where to host it.

There are a few things to consider for hosting your web site:

Web Hosting Consideration #1: What your site will be used for

First you need to know what your site’s purpose will be. Is it an online business? Personal home page? Family photo album? Gathering place to talk about your favorite game?

Web Hosting Consideration #2: What features your site will offer

Knowing the above will help you decide which features you need on your site. For example, you may want a photo album of sorts. Maybe a message board would be nice. Sticking a blog up there could be helpful. And maybe you need an e-commerce engine and credit card processing in order to sell all that jewelry you’ve been making. If you’re a developer, you might be making a lot of these things yourself, or modifying them.

Web Hosting Consideration #3: How many visitors you’ll have

If you plan on getting a lot of traffic, you should consider dedicated hosting and a lot of bandwidth. If it’s a small site about your pet cat, maybe you can just host it in your basement.

Web Hosting Consideration #4: Platform: ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, JSP, or something else

If you plan to develop web applications for your site, the platform makes a big difference depending on your skillset. I’m decent with PHP, but my strongest suit is Microsoft technology like ASP and ASP.NET.

If you’re neutral on platform, consider that PHP hosting is usually cheaper, you can usually find more free “widgets” to use with PHP, and PHP is easy enough to learn. However, you might want to learn ASP or ASP.NET for career reasons, and you might get better productivity gains using Visual Studio to build ASP/ASP.NET pages. I don’t see a lot of hosting providers that offer JSP. Lastly, if you’re just storing images, a blog, and static HTML, then you don’t need any of the above — you can use any hosting provider.

You can find tons of online arguments over which web platform is better. I will just say that any technology is sufficient to do most or all web development in.

Web Hosting Consideration #5: Software Modules

I wasn’t sure what to call this section, but I mean stuff like whether your site will need to be able to send email, whether you need a database, whether you need SSL processing. If you’re a developer, you’ll know if you need most of those things. Or if there are third party modules you’re going to integrate (e.g. some hot PHP messageboard module), you should read the requirements and compare it to where you host your site.

Web Hosting Consideration #6: Bandwidth

This has a lot to do with how popular your site is and what is stored there. If a lot of people come to your site, you’ll need a lot of bandwidth. Or, if you’re hosting huge files (like giant JPGs from your 5mp camera, or 2 hour streaming home movies from Grandma’s birthday), you’ll also need a lot of bandwidth to keep the performance up. A home DSL or cable connection can easily accommodate a few thousand people a day for a site with no or very few large files. Otherwise, you should look into getting a better home connection (768kbps upload or faster), or hosting elsewhere.

Web Hosting Consideration #7: Disk space

Has to do with how much stuff is on your site. As mentioned in the bandwidth section, huge files or lots of big photos take up a lot of room. Some hosting providers offer a lot of bandwidth but not a lot of room to store files. If you truly need tons of space (a lot of home movies?), then your options are more limited.

Web Hosting Consideration #8: Performance: CPU, memory, etc.

If you have a lot of traffic, you need more power. You’ll also need more CPU & ram if you’re running dynamic web applications like messageboards, e-commerce sites, etc.

Web Hosting Consideration #9: Uptime

Uptime (sometimes called availability) refers to what % of the time your site is responding. Hosting providers will often guarantee a certain uptime, so you should consider what the impact of your site being down for a few minutes/hours/days is. A site with 100% uptime is available 100% of the time, 24×7. Good for commercial sites with a lot of usage. A site with 99% uptime sounds good, but that means it could still be down 90 minutes a week and be considered 99% available. Lastly, if you’re hosting your site in your basement, or with a provider with no uptime guarantee, realize that your site might be down for hours or days. Maybe that’s ok, but you should stil consider it.

Web Hosting Consideration #10: Hosting provider

Now you can start to think about where to host your site. You have a few options:

Host it yourself

If you have a DSL or cable connection at home, and a spare computer, you can host your web site yourself. If you have a dynamic IP, there are services like DynDNS or TZO so you can point www.yourdomain.com to whatever your current IP is. Check your ISP’s terms of service, though — some ISPs prohibit users from hosting sites.

Pros:

  • You can use whatever operating system, software, or hardware you want. If you need more CPU or storage, you can always buy more. For example, ComputerGeeks is one place that sells cheap used computers — for $100-$200 you can get an entire machine that would work fine as a web server.

  • Affordable and flexible solution for small sites, since your current DSL/cable connection may be sufficient.

Cons:

  • May be prohibited by your ISP’s terms of service

  • If your site is large, bandwidth and hardware costs can add up

  • Ensuring high uptime can be problematic, even with a UPS.

  • You can spend a lot of time just managing the hardware and operating system. For some people this is a plus, I guess. 🙂

Typical sites:

  • Personal or family web sites with few visitors

  • Sites for technical hobbyists

  • Sites needing a lot of storage but not a lot of bandwidth

Use a free provider

If you have an ISP, chances are a free web site came with it. You can also find places like GeoCities where you can have a small site for free. Probabaly a good options for someone who just wants to store a few HTML pages.

Pros:

  • Free!

  • Less hassle, faster, and more stable than your basement.

Cons:

  • Usually no functionality other than static HTML pages and images.

  • Usually very little storage space.

Typical sites:

  • Personal home pages

  • Online resumes

Managed hosting plan

If the above two options don’t float your boat, you can have someone else host your site. You’ll have to do some research to see if plans and providers fit your needs and budget, but you can find plans anywhere from a few dollars a month (for basic sites) to a few hundred a month (for heavy duty sites). You can even find plans for dedicated servers (you have the entire web server to yourself) or co-location services (you purchase your own web server and store it at the hosting facility).

Pros:

  • Someone else will manage the equipment and operating system, freeing you to focus on your site.

  • Range of prices & plans means you can pay for what you want and skip what you don’t

  • Access to high uptime and value-added services like e-commerce software, etc.

Cons:

  • The main drawback is cost. You can find plans for $70/year or less if your budget is tight, but if you need a lot of bandwidth, storage, etc. it can add up.

Typical sites:

  • Suitable for all but the smallest of budgets

Some hosting providers you can check out:

Hopefully the above points will help point you in the right direction for web site hosting. Good luck with your site!

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Written by Ben Strackany -- January 11, 2005

Ben worked for a variety of tech startups in Chicago before moving to Portland and starting DevelopmentNow in 2005. When he's not herding cats, stirring pots, and taking names, he enjoys drinking coffee while irritating the studio audience with bad puns.