How to Choose a Web Host

You’re thinking about pioneering the digital landscape and making your own website. Good for you, and I mean that. One of the first steps you’ll come across is choosing the right host. What makes a good host? What should you look for in your host? Well, that’s why we’re both here. Let me clear up some confusion and help you select the right host.

The most basic aspect of a host is providing you with both memory and bandwidth. The more memory, the more you can place online. Also, the more memory, the more you will be paying. Assess your needs. If you are planning to run a simple content website with some pure CSS design, your memory needs will be sparse.

However, if you want to use detailed images, a hefty design and expect a lot of visitors (like with an online store) go for larger memory caches like 10 to 20GB of memory.

When you visit a lot of hosts, it has become popular to give you “unlimited” memory and “unlimited” bandwidth. While I’m not knocking the unlimited thing, you should know what it really means. Read this post to learn more.

Along with memory, your host needs to offer uptime. Uptime means how often the servers are online. It doesn’t matter if you get 100TB of memory and bandwidth if the servers are never online.

Most servers flaunt their 99% uptime, and 99% sounds great. But really you should search for a host that offers at least 99.5% uptime. Anything else is actually low (yes, the 0.5% really matters).

Now that we’ve talked about the basic components of a host, let’s delve deeper.

FTP (file transfer protocol) access is a must if you plan to upload anything on your website, especially large PHP scripts. Without FTP access, you will have to upload every file one at a time. With FTP, you can set 1,000s of files to upload automatically.

What about script support? Every host has HTML and CSS support, but what about PHP or Perl? You may never plan to use these scripts, but if you want to install any components on your website (like a content management system) you will need the support.

Lastly, does your host provide Fantastico? This nifty application lets you install CMS systems like WordPress with just a click.

The world of Web hosts can be hard to navigate, but once you know what to look for, finding the right host isn’t that hard at all.