Evaluating the Quality of Web Hosts

When you decide to set up your own website, you will encounter all manner of jargon about concepts like "hosting," "bandwidth," and "disk space." It can be overwhelming at first, but there are enough entities out there who want to set up your site for you, that you should have little trouble getting answers on topics that are new to you.

You may ask yourself, "How can I sift through all this information? All I want to do is to find a place to share photos from my new DSLR camera and write about my photography." A Google search on the words "setting up your own website" yields over 120 million results!

Providers of web hosting services offer countless goodies and extras in hopes of getting your business. Anything from free business cards to free Google Adwords might be tossed in by a provider. The best way to narrow down the candidates you want to research further is to make a list of what you want. This list doesn't have to be technical. You could make a "top 10" list in your own words, and use some of those words to refine your searches.

For example, your list might read something like, 1. easy photo uploads; 2. built-in blog software; 3. possibility of adding a shopping cart easily if I should decide to sell my photos; .

Quite naturally, this list will vary widely depending on whether you want to set up a site for your personal use, for starting a small business, or for taking a larger business into the 21 st century. Your budget will also factor into your choice.

There are free web hosts out there. They generally cover operating costs by placing banner and other ads on the sites of the people who set up with them. This might be a perfectly adequate setup for the beginner who wants to share personal news and photos with friends and family. It is, however, vitally important that you keep backups of your photos and your blog posts. Free web hosts have been known to go out of business with little warning, and you don't want to lose the fruits of all your work.

If, for instance, you take hundreds of pictures, you may want to invest in an external hard drive for your home computer. They start at under $100 and plug right in to your USB port. Such a backup will make your life easier whether your free web host goes belly up or whether your own computer suffers a crash.

The more you are willing to pay for web hosting services, the more disk space, backup, and security you will receive. While there are a few hardcore web developers who actually buy server hardware so that they have the ultimate control over its operation, it is far more common to rent server space.

Shared hosting means that the server space you are renting shares physical hardware with many other users. This type of hosting commonly ranges in price from a few dollars to twenty dollars per month. Shared hosting fits the needs of most web sites. There is also a form of renting server space at a higher monthly price that is a step up from plain shared hosting. A Virtual Private Server means that while you still share server space with other customers, the server is specially partitioned so that it is as if you have your very own server. So a neighbor's glitch won't affect your chunk of the server.

If you need lots of bandwidth, robust security, and massive storage space, you should consider renting an entire server. Dedicated hosting services range from $100s to $1000s per month and generally offer some level of 24-hour, 365-day technical support, but their interpretation of "technical support" on weekends and holidays may be different from yours. You should definitely ask up front what would happen if you called at 10 pm on Christmas with a technical problem.

Normally, the administrators at the hosting service will provide backups in the event of hardware failure, and they should be able to make a switch of server due to hardware failure transparent to you. They should offer 99.9% uptime and have the confidence to back up that promise.

There are dozens of web hosts for any type of site you might want to set up. But with your list of needs and wants handy, and your questions answered by the hosting company, you should be able to narrow the choices down until you find the one that is right for you. Do your homework, and you are likely to be happy with the service you choose.

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