When choosing a web host, you will need to consider the following factors.

Type of Website

What type of website do you require hosting for? If it’s a personal site, free hosting might cover your needs, although you may find the added advertising frustrating. However, if you’re running any sort of business website, you will need to pay for your hosting. Shared hosting is more than adequate for most small-to-medium business sites, and costs between £5 and £50 per month. If you are expecting huge amounts of traffic and are building a very complex site, you might want to consider dedicated hosting, which will run into the hundreds or even thousands of pounds a month, but which will offer you all the bandwidth and storage that you need.

Consider how much growth you should provide for. Make sure, if opting for shared hosting, that there will be the opportunity to upgrade if necessary.

Your Requirements

Make sure you have a list of things you need from your hosting package, so that you’re comparing like with like when considering different hosts. Hosts might offer lots of bells and whistles, but do you need them all? Good customer service might be more important to you than dozens of email accounts, the latest version of PERL, or PHP support.

Paid vs. Free

If you’re just setting up a site for fun, you may be willing to tolerate appalling customer service and multiple pop-up ads in exchange for the free hosting offered by sites like Geocities. Be warned that free hosting is extremely limited in terms of bandwidth and storage, doesn’t usually offer POP3 email addresses, and usually comes with dreadful customer service, or none whatsoever.

It is definitely worth paying if you’re running any sort of business site; £10/month is worth the extra credibility your own web hosting will afford, as well as the improved standard of support. You should also have a domain name, as this will add to the integrity of your online presence.

If you’re planning on selling anything on your site, consider whether you will need SSL (Secure Socket Layer), and also whether it would be useful for you to choose a host which provides a free shopping cart service for your site. Some hosts can also help you to set up a merchant account.

Price

For some, free hosting will be adequate, whilst for others, paying thousands of pounds for a dedicated server or co-location is worth the money. However, for most, paying £5 to £50 a month for shared hosting (depending on what features are required) is about right. Make sure you check up on whether your prospective host offers any money-back guarantees or refunds if you are dissatisfied or if there is an inordinate amount of downtime. Also check that you will be able to upgrade if necessary.

Platform

If you’re putting up a pretty basic HTML site, a Unix platform will be adequate for your needs. If you’re planning to use databases or ASP, you need to go with NT.

Storage and Bandwidth

Bandwidth and storage are often the basis for the rates of different packages, even though most sites only require about 30MB of space at most. There’s no need to pay for huge quantities of space, but do allow a bit of give, and be aware of hosts’ fees and penalties for exceeding limits, especially if you’re intending to have a lot of Flash or multimedia features on your site.

Email

If you’re going to need email addresses, and especially if you are a company of any size, check out how much it will cost you to add accounts. Some hosts offer the first five or so free, but then charge you £3 for every additional account, which can add up if your company has 150 staff.

FrontPage

Ideally, don’t use FrontPage at all; switch to Dreamweaver. If this isn’t possible, however, make sure that your host offers FrontPage extensions.

Customer Support

Don’t compromise on customer support. One of the biggest complaints about hosting companies is that their support is slow, incompetent or non-existent. Although email support will be adequate for most issues, make sure there is a phone number available for emergency support calls. Also, find out about the host’s average response times to support emails. Some will respond within a few minutes, whilst you might have to wait a few days to hear from others. Ideally, choose a host with a good reputation for prompt and knowledgeable customer service.

Other Considerations

Some hosts offer statistics packages. Some of these are more useful than others. Shop around if you think you need detailed statistics.

Any period of downtime can affect your search engine rankings and frustrate your customers. Check out your host’s reputation for uptime ratios and also whether they offer any sort of uptime guarantee.

Buy what you need and upgrade later – make sure that your package is scalable.

Finally, it cannot be stressed enough – do your research. It will pay off.

Author: Natalie Catchpole