Picking A Web Host And Selecting Your Hosting Type

I’ve written many times in the past about web hosts and web hosting types, so for reference here are three great articles on the subject you should take a quick look at:

• Having A Good Host Can Sure Save Your Sanity
• Picking A Good Web Host
• Types Of Hosting Packages Compared

Because I’ve already written on the subject, this post will simply expand on the previous articles.

Why You Should Get A Good Host

Having a good host is much more important than you might think. I learned that with a recent experience where my shared server’s hard drive died. The situation sucked, but my host, HostGator (aff link), quickly took care of the problem and replaced the drive. All in all Nusuni Dot Com only experienced around 2.5 hours of downtime. As an added bonus they even switched over to a brand new server. Pretty nice of them, huh?

I know for an absolute fact that my previous host would have left it running, even with a dead HD, for days and days. I have a feeling they wouldn’t replace it until the server was smoking and ready to go up in flames. I constantly had downtime with them (one reason I didn’t do much of anything with Nusuni Dot Com until I switched to my new host), and their tech support were… how shall I put it nicely? They were pricks.

Having a good host saves your sanity. Plus if something goes wrong it is nice to know that your host will take good care of you, which is something every business should do.

Finding A Good Host

Web host hunting is a tricky game. There are two sites I use for some research: Web Hosting Jury and Google. Whenever I use Google I usually just type in the hosts name, then something like “sucks” after it. When looking for a host always look at the horror stories - that is a good indicator of whether or not the host is good or bad.

To be honest there is no real trick to it. Just stick with the ones that seem to have better service than the others. Oh, and stay away from the guys that offer “unlimited bandwidth” or “unlimited space”, 9 times out of 10 they are horrible hosts.

What Type Of Server

There are usually 3 types of servers that you can get: Shared, Semi-Dedicated, and Dedicated.

• Shared - Shared hosting is the cheapest. Basically they toss you on a server with 50-300 other people, so it is much less secure and performance can be iffy at times. Most shared servers also can’t handle it if you get an article on the Digg Frontpage (which can send anywhere from 10k to 30k people, maybe more or less). However, they can easily handle the daily traffic loads that you will most likely get.
• Semi-Dedicated - These are servers that are usually split up using virtualization software (everyone is in their own environment, they can’t see each others files), and they have less than a dozen people on it. They are much more secure than shared servers, but the limits on CPU and memory usage can cause major headaches, even with normal traffic. It is still a better alternative to shared hosting if you can’t quite afford a dedicated server.
• Dedicated - The big guys use these. There is only one person that is on the server - you, so you get all resources, pretty nice amounts of space and bandwidth, and you usually don’t have to worry about your host booting you if you get hit by Digg. Heck, they can survive a full-on social media attack from Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and Slashdot. You can also install whatever you want on them, and you can do much more than you can with shared or semi-dedicated servers. They cost a lot, however.

Generally speaking you should start out with a shared server, unless your an expert with viral marketing and expect to get 20k hits a day 2 days after starting your blog.

The Server OS?

Stick with Linux. Most blog software requires Apache, PHP, and MySQL, all of which run the best on Linux OSes.

Bandwidth and Space?

Most hosts oversell these days, so bandwidth (how much data you can transfer each month) and disk space shouldn’t be a big concern. Nusuni.com is only a few dozen megabytes in size, and it uses nowhere near the 100GB of bandwidth alloted to it. 100GB of bandwidth is enough for tens of thousands of hits per day, something that not very many blogs get.

Overview

Finding a good host is the tricky part. While it may seem logical to check regular review sites, most of the time they are given some incentive to rate one host better than the other. Your best bet is to go on user-submitted review sites and Google and look for the worst stories and see how they say the host did. Also check the date on the reviews, sometimes hosts can experience huge attacks a year earlier and no one has submitted a review since, so all you see are reviews from a year ago. Before you sign up with a host use their live-chat (if they don’t have it, leave) and see how their support people are.

As far as the hosting packages go, stick with shared hosting in the beginning unless you have a good reason not to. If you have a good host, their shared server will work perfectly. And get a Linux server - trust me it’s easier.

And as with anything, avoid getting into long-term contracts (unless you trust your host), and read the darn Terms of Use!

Stay tuned for even more Back To The Basics posts!

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