Web Hosting Guide and Tips

Web Hosting Guide and Tips - part one

Selecting the right web host is a very important decision. Whatever the purpose of your website, you will want a web host that will allow the internet to beat a path to your creation, your newly born web site. Your web host selection will enable you to interact with the denizens of the web. It’s only through your web site, and reliable access to it, that you will be able to accomplish your goals.

Your web goals may be very simple or complex. You may simply wish to share information, amaze the world with your videos or music downloads, or you may be embarking into the sea of e-commerce by selling products and services.

Choosing a web host can be a very confusing task. There are hordes of web hosts and all have wonderful advertisements promising you everything for prices ranging from the ridiculously small to the blatantly outrageous.

How to choose? The first step is easy, read this article!! I’ll go through some of the steps I have learned the hard way. Hopefully these can help you to avoid some of the potholes in the road to web mastery.

Odds are, since you have found this site, you have been burnt a time or two with a bad web host. But you have learnt and hope that a little research before handing over your hard earned cash to “We are everything to all customers for $1 per month” web host could save you from “web site not found” messages just as your web traffic begins to grow.


1. List your needs – bandwidth, storage space, number of domains which you can host, email accounts, ftp accounts, ssh access, php and mysql versions, number of mysql databases allowed, is the server Windows or Linux/Unix, cgi/perl scripts, available website free scripts for installation, website management (Cpanel, or ?), .htaccess, any special programming languages such as Ruby on Rails or Python,
2. Research – (you have already started, right? After all you are reading this!)
a. Look for web hosts –search through Google or Yahoo or whatever your favorite search engine is. Make a list, in a text editor like Note pad, of the web hosts that meet your requirements. Develop a question about the web host services they offer. (I had a particular need relating to allowable file permissions. Emailing or live chatting with the various web host candidates was a good way to see how responsive their customer service is (I’m still waiting for responses from a couple of web hosts, and its four months and counting now!).) Asking if they run SuPHP or SuExec ( add ons which increase security for the web host and web sites) can be a good question – do they know what it is?
b. If they pass the customer service/live chat test take your search to the next level. Search the web for their name - “wehostprovider.com”. Here you are looking for reviews of their service. I have even found website domains which an angry customer has bought and developed just to let others know of his bad experiences with a certain company! This can certainly be a red flag. Check the dates on any reviews, good of bad. If the information is several years old (or even months) things may have changed radically. If the reviews sound just like the sales pitch on the web host’s own site, sprinkle salt genously and move on!
Many web hosts have support forums – check them out! A few bad comments shouldn’t scare you off. Think about it, the web host could have deleted them. Leaving the bad comments gives the web host an opportunity to reply with their side of the story and how the problem was solved.

more to come

One of the best web hosts that I have found is Bluehost.com. Their customer service is exceptional and the bandwidth and storage they offer is a great value. Do your due diligence research, and I'm sure you will find that Bluehost passes with flying colors.

Some hints for those seeking reliable web hosting

Some hints and tips for those seeking reliable web hosting. My goal here is to give you some tools to sieve out the scumbag, liar, cheat, and thief web host providers that are out there. Using these tips you should fill your net with web hosts worth your time and money, enabling you to find a new home for your web site.

First you need to find the web hosts. Just search for "web host providers" and you will get a daunting list of prospects. They will all promise reliability, great bandwidth and storage space and great customer service.

Once you have a likely prospect or two, you need to crank your screening process up to the next level. You need to search the web on their business name looking for more information. You may find reviews and you may find links to the web host’s own forum.

Check out the web host's forum - if they are having technical difficulties you may find signs of that here. You will be able to see how active their customers are and get an idea of how many customers they have. You will be able to see if people are having trouble resolving problems with the web host. You may find the web site names of some of the web hosts customers which you can also check on. Also make note of the dates on posts - little or no current activity could say that everything is going well and no one has any questions or problems. Or it could indicate a web host whose client base is no longer growing and could be on a downward spiral.

You'll find sites that purport to "review" sites - check them out. Many of these "review' sites are no more than ads for the web hosts they appear to be reviewing. If the review sounds more like their sales brochure than something a customer might have written, grab that saltshaker; the information on this "review" site is pretty tainted.
Is the review dated, as in several years old? Things change fast on the www - a good or bad review from a year or two ago may have nothing to do with how their current customers are faring.

If the review appears to be from a customer - does it give their web site url - bring the web site up - are they still on the web? Take their name.com and use a domain registration search to see if their current nameservers still point to the company they have reviewed.

Take the prospective web host’s domainname.com and look it up in the domain registration lookup and see who serves them - look for them on the web - are they a parent company? See what the reviews are on them - I smoked out one sleazy bad web host provider this way - turned out both the parent and the "child" providers had bad track records.

Also when you look up the prospective web host’s name on the domain registration look up - you'll find a person's name. Sometimes it will be a technical admin sort of person, sometimes the president/ceo of the company - whoever it is, do a search on that person's name on the web - you may find that they have a bad reputation and have been hiding in various companies.

Check out their help documents and search features - one site I looked into, all their faq's had document dates of April 2004. None had been updated and no new ones added in the three years since - computing just isn't this static - it was a red flag, to me. Maybe not enough to throw them out, but it urged me to search further on them.

This should give you a good start on finding that elusive quantity – a reliable web host.