September 24th, 2008 in webhost | Comments Off
There isnt a simple answer to the question, “Which is the best web hosting company?”, as the answer depends entirely on your needs. To be honest, I’ve always gone for the cheapest. Sometimes I’ve been pleasently surprised, sometimes its led to major issues.
Below are three short tales from the crypt of problems I’ve had with webhosts:
The ISP HostMy first serious website was hosted on the subdomain of a free ISP I used about tenyears ago. For the price, the hosting was fantastic. It was reliable, fast and the support was excellent. However, about a year ago the company went bankrupt and down went my website. As the site was hosted on a subdomain (ie it was name.isp.com rather than name.com), the site went down and there was nothing I could do. The moral here is if you’re making a serious website, buy a domain name.
The trapping webhostAnother problem I had early on was when I hosted a website with 10quid. The dealwas great for a small website: for 10 pounds you get a domain name and basic hosting. The problem was, the hosting was limited to about 1mb. Once the website started to expand, I needed to upgrade the hosting space but found the next level of hosting was ten times as expensive! Note: 10quid have since improved their basic hosting deal.
A related problem are hosts that register domains under their name, not yours. This can make transferring domains troublesome.Right, so thats my advice on avoiding particular problems. Now here are some things you may wish to consider:
Price – My advice here is not to pay for more than you need, but make sure thatupgrading is possible and affordable.
Location – Getting a host from your own country can increase your search enginerankings for users in your own country. On the balance, you may be targetting internationalusers, and may wish to make use of the cheap dollar (if you’re outside the us). Also, support is considerably easier in a country that speaks your language, than trying to use google to translate between Thai and English every time you have a problem.
Bad neighbourhoods – Before you sign up for a host use a site like MyIpNeighbours tosee whoelse is hosted with them. If all you see is spam sites, then search engines may thinkyour site is spam too.
Scripting and Apps support – If you are an experienced web designer you’ll no doubtneed atleast PHP and MySQL. If you are less experienced the EasyApps collection inCpanel can be a useful way of easily setting up content management systems.
Bandwidth and Space Make a generous estimate for how much bandwidth and harddrive space you will need. Say 500 pages at 100kb will require ~50mb. Say 1000 visitors/dayeach viewing 2 pages will need ~ 6GB/month. If you’re hosting large images or videos expect considerably more. Again my advice is to not get too optimistic and pay for more than you will need, but make sure you can upgrade at a reasonable cost.Hosts I recommend
The following hosts I’ve tried and reccomend. Hosts with a * I get a commision from if you do sign up- but I haven’t reccomended anything I’ve tried and liked.
Worria.com -The host this site is on. A little slow, not that that reliable (ie uptime can be an issue) but very affordable
BlueHost* – A very reliable host, plans starting at $7/month
iPowerWeb Hosting* – $7.95/Mo., 1500 GB of Space, 15000 GB of Transfer, 2500 Emails (domain name included). Good reliability
