Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 8m 1,905
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
When it comes to a website, there are many things that may be overlooked or not even thought of until the last minute. A domain name, the type of website, what to put on it, how much is it going to cost, hiring a professional, an amateur, or just do it yourself? And finally, a web host.
In short, when you register a domain, you register with a certified Registrar, a service that can manages Internet Domain Names and is able to associate them with the unique IP address where the web host is, which enables the display of a website. The web host is where your files are hosted.
To understand it visually, your data files are sitting on someone’s computer that is on nearly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and allows for connections to be made to it in order for it to be accessed. For example, when you upload a video to YouTube, a photo to Facebook, or even a Status Update to Twitter, you are storing that video on a YouTube server, a Facebook server, or a Twitter server. A server is another name for a computer that can store large data files.
Now that you have an idea of what a web host is, the next challenge is finding a good web host. Where do you go? What do you do? How much should you pay? Free Web Hosting vs. Paid Web Hosting?
When I first began searching for a web host, I was pretty much all about going the free route. There were two web hosts I came across that I ended up trying. The first was ByetHost.com, which offered completely free web hosting. This was great. I was broke and wanted to start up my website for free. Why not get it for free? There are some things in life that are free and you can even get great service for. But “free” is hardly ever without consequences unless volunteerism is involved or just true kindness.
Google offers plenty of products that are “free” that are top quality. Don’t get me wrong, I love Google and I use Gmail for everything. But “free” comes at the cost of seeing ads on the sides, ads everywhere. Someone is paying the bill for those products to be free. And that bill amounts to billions of dollars in revenue.
However, if you are not Google, the company that is offering free services probably does not have a full time staff or full support going to the free product. After all, all your resources, dedication and support will be directed at making your paying customers happy.
The non-paying free customers often do not get any tech support and are put on crowded servers or servers that are not really looked after all the time and are probably never backed up ever, so incase the server crashes, all your files will be gone and you will have to start from scratch all over again. So, you basically will get what you pay for when it comes to web hosting. Honestly, if you are just starting out and want to learn about web hosts and creating websites, I actually recommend you get a free web host and experience it for a few months, you will certainly see why you should probably pay a few bucks for web hosting.
After I had tired of using a free web host, due to outages, slowness, and unanswered or delayed responses to Support, I decided to find a cheap host. I came across AstaHost.com, which had an interesting concept, it offered a kind of free web hosting, but you had to post on their forums which paid for your web hosting. You had to post relevant content on the message boards and each post could earn you up to $1 or more.
I really did not want to pay any cash out of my own pocket and this really seemed like a great way to get a domain name and web hosting. I spent several weeks posting on the forums, building up more and more money, and developing relevant content. The forums seemed to be half dead and half alive. If this was how people could have free hosting, why not use it? Turns out, you get so busy with your website, you really don’t have time to post on the forums anymore, and thus, you may end up just paying via Paypal or Credit card the few bucks it costs each month to continue hosting your website.
When it comes to web hosting, there are plenty of web hosts who want your money. You can pay as little as a penny for web hosting or just few bucks to much more. There are web hosts who will try to rip you off and there are web hosts who are honest. The average costs of web hosting should be between $2 and $10.
You could end up paying more if you have a Web Designer or a company set up a Domain, Web Host and/or website for you and take care of everything for you. The reason that it is more expensive, aside from making a little profit, is the fact that they are maintaining it for you. If there are problems with your site, they will have to do some work on it to get it back up.
It may not even be in their control and they will be serving as the middleman for a while. I certainly would not condone someone hosting a website and managing everything, but if they are charging you a fortune a year to do that, you might be better off going elsewhere. I would estimate the average cost of Web Designer or a Company hosting your website should be around $100 a year.
What are the benefits of each of these? They each offer the same service of web hosting, but each are certainly unique in terms of pricing, technical support, tools, and assistance. What makes one better than the other? Better pricing, technical support, tools, and assistance. Some will have great deals one month and another may have better deals the next month.
How do you figure out which web host to go with? Every web host has their ups and downs. Most guarantee 99.9% uptime, which means that your website will never go down, no matter what. This is mostly true but it will never be 100%. If your website goes down once or twice a year, and only for a few hardly noticable minutes, I’d say that is a pretty good host. If your website goes down several times a month for more than 5 minutes, you should probably email your web host to figure out why it is going down and if it continues, you will be leaving their service. They will likely move you to a better server.
Why do web hosts go down? When you sign up and pay for a web host, you are paying to share a computer with a hundred other people. What you are really paying for is to use a few resources. Unfortunately, these resources are limited to a certain amount and once that amount has nearly run out, your site will go down. When your website demands too many requests, queries, or bandwidth, it may be penalized and temporarily shut down, or permanenlty suspended.
To get your own real web host, known as a VPS (Virtual Private Server), it would actually cost a few hundred dollars a year. If you feel your website is growing in popularity to the point where your site is constantly going down, you may want to invest in a VPS because a shared host can only process so much data. In other words, you are allocated to a certain amount of bandwidth and space, and when you run out of that allocated space, your website is cut off or slowed down severely until the next month. If you have a VPS, you are buying all the resources and not limited to any resources except whatever the computer limitations are for that server. There is a lot more information about a VPS which will be discussed in another blog posting.
Another reason in determining a good web host is location. Location is everything. How many data centers does your web host have? Data centers are where the computers are located. You could be running out of someone’s home if you went with an unknown start web host. Or you could be in California, Florida, Arizona, Texas, England, Germany, China, or India. The main thing to consider if the web host is in another country is the time zones.
A web host I went with and enjoyed for over two years was located in India. They were very nice, but if something happend to my site, I would send an email and if i was lucky, I could get a response within a few hours. In worse times, I might be waiting almost 24 to 48 hours for a response, because India is 10 hours ahead of New York / EST.
Your best bet is to search for reviews on a web host. The majority of web host reviews are extremely mixed. Many people have a great experience with a specific web host, while many others also have a horrible experience. In a search engine, put in your web host and then something negative about it. For example, “[Web host] sucks” or “Why [web host] is terrible” or “My bad experience with [Web Host]”.
If you manage to find a Web host that does not have a review that says it sucks, it is likely a web host that is just starting out or does not have enough people to review it yet. Just because a review is negative does not mean the web host is bad or that it sucks. Often times, that person just had a bad experience and may not have been patient enough.
There are certainly people who will have bad experiences with a web host and the fault actually does lie with the web hosting company. This is just an experience and one bad experience might ruin the image of the company forever. However, it is good those reviews exist because the Web Hosting company may eventually read it and improve their services if there are too many complaints about its service.
Pick a host after doing your research and go with them. If you find the majority of complaints are minor, than the host is probably good enough to try. Remember that there is never a permanent contract with any web host you choose, unless you opt for a service that offers year contracts. If you find that the service is lacking and several emails and complaints to the company are not getting you anywhere, simply stop paying or email them to tell them you want to cancel.
When I got serious about my websites and web hosting, I ended up ditching the cheap host and going with DreamHost with whom I was been with for over 3 years before switching to Vultr for more control of my hosting — Confessions of the Professions runs on it and there are rarely ever issues. If you have come across a great web host, feel free to post in the comments the web host you found and why you had a great experience with them.
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