Reasons for hosting your website

You might already have a website of your own, or you want to build an online store. If you want your web site to be visible to the world, you have to store it on a web server at a web hosting company.  The web server handles all the traffics between visitors and your website. Hosting company provides you with powerful hardware and software, connection speed, stability and security.

Before you choose a web hosting company

You should compile a checklist for all your requirements that meet your purpose. Consider a list of the following:

• Customer support--make sure you have support whenever you need it. It might not seem important at first, but you will find out it can be very critical to your online business. A toll free number is a plus, so that you don't have to pay for the call.
• Disk space--if you have a website that stores a lot of data such as video and music files, you should go with a big storage. If this is not a critical issue, emphasis on something more important to your website.
• Bandwith--study the web hosting company's traffic volume restrictions. Make sure that you don't have to pay a fortune for unexpected high traffic if your web site becomes popular.
• eCommerce feature--this is very important to online store websites. Make sure your web hosting company supports all the features you need such as SSL, Shopping Cart, database, and even webiste builders.
• Web hosting server platform--are you a Windows person or a Linux/Unix person? Choose the one that you feel comfortable to work with.
• Daily backup--Make sure your hosting company can run a secure daily backup routine, otherwise you may lose valuable data. Most web host perform automatic backup with mirrored RAID.
• email capability--Make sure your provider fully supports the email capabilities you need.
• Front page extension--if your website was built with Front page, you need this compatibility at the server.

Domain and subdomain

A domain name is a unique name for a web site, like yahoo.com and google.com. Domain names must be registered. When domain names are registered they are added to a large domain name register, and information about your site, including your internet IP address, is stored on a DNS server. Some web hosting company provide free domain name(s) at sign up. You will only have to choose the domain name for your website and the company will take care of the rest for you. Tips for choosing a domain name:

Short -- The shorter your domain, the easier it is to remember and minimize user typo while typing it.
Meaningful -- Easy to enter or remember. Select a domain that relates to your site in a way that people will understand.
Clear--You should avoid selecting a name that is difficult to spell or pronounce. Also, pay close attention to how your domain sounds and how effectively it can be communicated over the phone.

Common examples of subdomains used on the internet are http://news.yahoo.com and http://money.cnn.com. Subdomains can be created on a DNS server and they don't need to be registered with a domain registrar, though the original domain would need to be registered before a sub domain could be created.

How much disk space do I need?

Average HTML page to take up between 5 and 50KB of disk space, depending on the use of images or other space consuming elements. So for a website that contains 100 pages, you will need somewhere around 5MB of space. But the internet evolves in such a fast pace, a bigger storage space should be considered for future development. And for those websites that store multimedia files such as movie/music and pictures, there is a good reason for bigger disk space.

How much Bandwidth do I need?

You can calculate the bandwidth you need by multiplying your average page size with the number of expected page views per month. Depending on the traffics, a small or medium web site will consume between 1GB and 5GB of data transfer per month. As your website becomes popular, expect it the bandwidth to increase. You should project your current need and future growth. Find out what are the restrictions on monthly transfer, will you be charged extra if you exceed the limit, will future upgrade be needed, is upgrading a simple task.

How fast is your web hosting speed?

Email account

Web hosting provider should include email account and email service. If your website is www.mysite.com, there should be one email account for each individual for this website, ie., james@mysite.com.

Web hosting platform: Windows or Unix/Linux

Windows hosting means hosting of web services on servers that run on the Windows operating system.You should choose Windows hosting if you plan to use ASP (Active Server Pages) as server scripting, or if you plan to use a database like Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL Server. Windows hosting is also the best choice if you plan to develop your web site using Microsoft Front Page.

Unix/Linux hosting means hosting of web services on servers that run on the Unix operating system. Unix is known for being reliable and stable. You should choose Unix/Linux web hosting is often cheaper than Windows hosting.

E-commerce Features

Shared SSL Certificate: SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It is a technique that encrypts traffics between the client's computer and a web server. A share SSL Certificate often is provided by your web host under one single domain name, usually your web host's domain name. Share SSL Certificate can be used to secure your site, but only under the your web host's domain.

Shopping Cart: Most web hosts offer free Shopping Cart. As its name says, a Shopping Cart is software application that handles all the shopping processes on your website, including selecting products to checkout.

Secure Server

If you have an online store that handles online credit card transactions, or if your data needs to be protected against unauthorized access, your web hosting server must provide a secure server.