Web Hosting: Which Is The Host With The Most?

So you want to publish a website to you? Welcome to the club. These days it seems that almost everyone has a website of a kind, and thousands more continue to be launched every day. It's challenging enough to design a site and fill it with interesting content, but when all is said and done another challenge still remains - where to host? A popular choice for newbie webmasters, and even more experienced, is to secure a free hosting plan with a company like Yahoo Geocities, Tripod or Angelfire. While these are easy to install and free, they have limitations. Most free hosts do not offer all the nice features that paid hosts do such as FTP access, CGI-BIN, or your own personal domain name. Instead you're stuck with minimal features and a generic URL such as [http://www.freewebhost.com/marcswebsite]. This somewhat limited potential of your website. Most free hosts also require you banners or pop-up ads on your website run to make it worth it - these banners and pop-ups can obstruct the view of your web page and ultimately annoy visitors and drive them away. Finally, most free hosts have a daily bandwidth limit that is very small, so if you get a lot of traffic you will probably more than the allotted bandwidth and your site will be temporarily disabled. Overall I would recommend free web hosts for people new to web hosting and want a feel for how it works to get. I'd also recommend them for websites that are personal in nature (such as an online diary) and Web sites that are not going to generate any revenue. Free web hosts are a good stepping stone to paid web hosts - I myself starting building web sites 4 years ago using free hosts, and today I run several high traffic websites that are hosted on paid web hosting plans. Now is the time to the good stuff - paid web hosting. Web hosting companies that charge for their services abound on the Internet, and have a wide range of hosting packages at various prices. First we start with the "budget" web hosts, who claim to offer you the world for only $ 1 per month. Have used a large number of similar companies I feel I must tell you that you can proceed with caution, because these companies are not all they are cracked too. Many claim to 24 / 7 email support, which in my experience showed 0 / 0 e-mail support services. My e-mails were either never answered or answered a week after I sent them. Even when I was a response of a general nature and completely useless. Also, expect frequent outages with these budget web hosts as they rarely even have their own web servers - often they are reselling space on someone else's web servers over which they have no control. One budget web host I used went unexpectedly to 6 days, and they did not even bother to notify their customers. As a result, my web site is down for 6 days and I lost most of my visitors as well as my hard-earned search engine rankings. Lesson learned: if the reliability and success of your website is important to you, budget web hosting might not be the answer. This is not to say that all budget web hosts are bad items - 1dollarhosting.com is one of the leaders in the budget web hosting arena and has quite a reputation. The next type of paid web host is what I see as a "mid-range" web host, meaning that the prices and service that meets the majority of the websites to offer there. Mid-range web hosts like PowWeb, Your-Site.com and iPowerWeb offer packages ranging from $ 5 to $ 8 per month and provide the tools that most webmasters need a website, such as run: CGI-BIN, tons of e-mail addresses, FTP support, visitor statistics and much more. These hosts have monthly bandwidth limits, but the limits are quite high, and most websites will never reach. However, if your site contains hundreds of file downloads and gets decent traffic you may be shocked at how quickly you come to these bandwidth limits. If you do, your site may be temporarily down or you'll have to overdose bandwidth costs, which can get pricey pay. Generally, however, mid-range web hosts satisfactory for 90% of websites out there, and generally offer excellent uptime / reliability. In fact, many web-based businesses to be successful using a mid-range web host. However, as previously mentioned, websites to download large files or sites that a huge amount of traffic to offer, find that a mid-range host does not do their needs. These types of sites may require "high-end web hosting solutions, the next topic in our discussion. High-end web hosts typically service web sites that are very popular, have a high amount of traffic, and / or require pretty much 100% uptime. Most companies rely on high-end web hosts to host their websites. Rackspace.com is an example of a known high-end web hosting company. Pricing for high-end hosts varies, but usually runs from about $ 50 per month to several hundred dollars a month. Many high-end hosts give you your own dedicated server (they support) that is reserved just for you and your website. The mid-range hosts I discussed earlier typically host many different websites on same server - this is known as "shared" hosting. High-end web hosts offer stellar reliability, bandwidth, and just about every tool you'll ever need to run a successful website. Another feature that some high-end web hosts provide is "co-location" hosting. In this scenario, you configure and ensure the web server, but you get to plug in their data center / network. This can be really nice because their data center usually has a direct fiber connection to the Internet, offering blazing bandwidth and stellar reliability. People who run web-based businesses or extremely popular, high traffic websites are good candidates for high-end web hosting. Hopefully this brief overview gives you a good idea of the different types of web hosts that exist, and which one would be good for you. When you begin your search for a web host, always keep in mind the old adage "You get what you pay for" because it really blends in this case. Before the commitment to host a site sure to take some time and what you want to analyze the Web site, and which factors are most important for determining its success. Answering these questions will give you many steps closer to choosing the web host that's right for you.