Unbiased Step-by-step Guide on Web-Hosting

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of having paid hosting. If youthink your brand d Unbiased Step-by-step Guide on Web-Hostingcopyright (c) Pavel LenshinNo more speeches about importance of your own domain, nomore talks about necessity of having paid hosting.
If youthink your brand domain name and stable hosting with anumber of features and absence of ads are not worth, atleast, $50-$150 per year, then you probably want to playgames, rather than build online business.Choosing hosting provider is something similar to choosingthe place of your off-line office. Despite the fact that itis as easy to enter the URL and go to web-site that isphysically located in Sidney as in Oslo, the final role hereplays the speed of connection and stability of the hostingitself.The problem with hosting comes down to the old statute ofrunning ebusiness - that is RESEARCH before ACT!The easiest thing to do online is to pay money, the hardestis to THINK OVER what I'm paying for! That statement is truewith hosting also because you can pay, let's say, $35monthly for some particular hosting service, without noticethat in two mouse clicks there is an hosting offer providingtwo times better services all for $15 per month only, so youwill keep on losing services as well as $20 monthly thataccumulates up to $240 annually losses as a Fee for notdoing hosting research!Besides you should keep your eyes open for very gooddiscounted offers that could save you 30-50% for the firstyear of payments.Phase I - Determining NEEDS1.
Estimate your ebusiness basic requirements: totalweb-space needed, monthly bandwidth (approximate trafficvolume multiplied by the most visited web-pages' total size)and ability to run CGI scripts as a must for everyebusiness.If it is content rich web-site and example of your firstyear of hosting may look like this:· 30-50Mb of disc space;· 500Mb-1Gb of monthly bandwidth;· cgi-bin to be able to run your own scripts anoffer additional services;If it is sales web-site, your first year of hosting shouldbe something similar to these requirements:· 50-300Mb of disc space depending on how much infoproducts you are going to sell and therefore upload on yourserver;· 1-3Gb of monthly bandwidth;· cgi-bin to be able to run your own scripts anoffer additional services;In particular case with one-two ebooks and three-four pagessales web-site, 10Mb of storage space with 500Mb of monthlybandwidth, in general, is more than enough, if you are notgoing to expand it, so look closely and examine yourpotential but remember: you ALWAYS have a chance to expand,but you will NOT be able to get your money back if youoverpay for services or web-space you don't need. That iscalled efficient ebusiness running.2.
Determine additional services that are necessary orpreferably to have. Consider among them the following:- Email aliases- URL Redirects- Web Mail- FTP access/ FTP Accounts- Web control panel- Graphic statistics- Custom error pages- POP3 Accounts- Sub-domains- Autoresponders- Mailing List(s)- Password protected directories- MYSQL database(s)- Perl- PHP- SSIand- marketing info & support- promotional help (SE submissions, free banner impressions)- shopping cart- chat- forum3.
Plan your hosting expenses beforehand. Usually theamount you pay depends on the amount of services you choose,but not always as there are hosting providers, which offeridentical services for totally different money.
The sayingthat "You get what you paid for" is not necessarily true,especially what concerns high profit margins internetbusiness. Although hosting service is not pure online as itinvolves some physical computer systems to be installed,nevertheless paying more for less is extremely possible.
Inother words, know your budget.Phase II. Selecting the ONLY ONE!1.
Those who start looking for proper place or businessweb-site should have one or several possible costs in viewthat you knew or met positive feedback about. For now justmake a note of them and put aside, we will come back for them in the step 3.2.
Now it is time to search among hundreds of offers.Accomplish your search by filling online forms at:http://www.google.comhttp://www.hostcompare.comhttp://www.findmyhosting.comhttp://www.findwebspace.comhttp://www.hostsearch.com/search_main.aspClick on advanced/enhanced search option if available, inputall your approximate criteria that we determined at thefirst phase and here we go! Tens if not hundreds of wannabeyour host providers at your computer screen in less than aminute.3. Narrow your search by selecting first en (or more if youhave the will and spare time) on every search site page(s)result.Now you should have 50 (or more) host providers as a resultof host searching and 2-5 hosting companies you heard andknew about before.In the next step we will start to compare all of them inorder to choose the one that deserves your hard-earnedmoney.
This task is being accomplished by simple viewing andtesting each of the host providers' web-site. How to testand what things to pay close attention to are explainedbelow, but first eliminate all double hosts if there areany.4.
Knowing your potential market will help you todifferentiate some of the host providers by selecting thosewho are physically located closer to your market. If yourauditory is mainly English speaking people then you shouldthink about choosing servers that are located in US.
If youare a German restaurant owner running web-site for localmarket it is not critical, but preferable to put yourweb-site to web servers that are located in Germany, not inUS. I have mentioned web servers instead of hostingproviders on purpose, because the hosting provider itselfmay be located and registered in one place, but having theirservers co-located in other city or country, like my ownprovider situated in Moscow, but the web-site they host,physically co-located at their US servers.If you provide universal services (like web-design) andshoot for the global markets offering Multilanguage site,then physical location of host provider is subsidiary.5.
Then we will remove absolute "losers". The firstcriterion they won't pass is the look of their web-site.
Isit professional or there are amateurish colors with 3 ormore banners? If you think the price of their site design isnot even worth $100 you may close their site and forgetabout them. By doing so, you distinguish profitable hostproviders from those that don't even have $300-1000 toinvest in the professional look of their web-site.You may not even read what they wrote on their sites astheir appearances tell ten times more about their businessesthan no words can.6.
Check technical specifications of the hosting serversthat are being offered for your shared hosting. Needless tosay that Pentium III 450 Mhz with 1 Gb of RAM, for instance,is worse than Pentium IV 2.2 Ghz with 4 Gb of RAM.
Outerchannels bandwidth and speed can also give you the image ofhow established the host provider is.You may not need to know all specifications of routers,connectors or other devices, just ask for specific numbersthat are easy to compare. That analysis will also tell whathosts are worth further testing and what aren't.7.
We also need to reassure that our web-site as well as allpossible databases won't be vanished due to power supplyoverload, virus, fire etc. It is important to check whatkind of maintenance conditions they offer.- Do they provide 99,9% uptime guarantee?- What kind of independent power supply they offer?- Is there automatic back up option?- Do they have fire and humidity control systems?Some host providers wouldn't even bother to tell you aboutthese control systems.
You know what to do with them - theygo off the list!8. Next stage is to send them a prewritten email asking forsome question.
It may be some purposeful inquiry orimaginary one just for testing task. Those who failed toresponse in 24 hours are off the list also.
Remember, thatemail, due to the "unstable nature" of the internet, may notbe even delivered, so write for the second time, if noresponse again, than they aren't worth the ink to spend onthem by crossing their web-site address out of the list :0)Just carefully tear them out :0)9. The last test that we run is to check the connectionspeed of the remaining hosts.
You should know how fast theresponse of your web-site will be.Two online services would help us in fulfilling this task,namely:http://www.netmechanic.com/server_check/site_monitoring.htmthis one will check a particular server within 8 hours andemail you the report.http://www.webhostdir.com oolkit/comparehosts.asp allows tocompare 4 hosts simultaneously by entering 4 domain names ofrespective web-sites.I would suggest testing each host twice. First time to checkthe response rate of their corporate web-sites, and secondtime by comparing speed of their clients' web-site as theremay be a big difference.
Just make sure clients are usingapproximately the same shared hosting plans.That is all. By now you should have several options, yourgold, silver and bronze hosting winners.
You can go ahead insetting up your web-site with anyone you prefer more. Don'tlose the rest though, as they may prove to be useful in casesome collision occurs with your present "winner".Last thing.
When your web-site is online, don't just forgetto create additional page for providing your new service -expert analysis of selecting web-hosting. :0) Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .