Nowadays you can easily find a deal for less than $100 per year which includes just about any feature you use.
thanks for the reply Andrea.. I'm very happy with my webhost, if you'd like to take a look, please do.. http://www.featherish.com Just looking on the internet the prices vary so much, and how do you know who is good?
To be honest, it is a complete gamble.. You have to go with some guts and a lot of faith... Talk to the people first, see what kind of people you'll have to deal with first. 1. Ask them a few questions to see if they even know 1/10 of what they say they do... 2. Know what kind of services you need now, and try and find out what kind you will need in the future (everyone has some ideas on where they want their site to go). 3. What are upgrade costs going to run.. 4. Most places nail you on support costs.. They say they give a certain level of support, but somehow no matter what you need help with BAM its 25-150/hour to fix it... 5. What is their support turn around (ie if you email them a problem is it gonna take 24-48 hours or a week??) 6. What kind of downtime (if any) do they experience? 7. How often do they upgrade security, etc... Those are just some of things you need to dig into to find a good hosting company...
Yes, that's a good point. Find out even the free support is also a Toll Free phone call. Is the "Live" support email, chat script or actual live phone operator.
Thanks for your response. I was going to go with a free webhost, but figured you get what you pay for, and quickly let go of that idea. I myself would rather pay for quality, dependable webhost. I know a lot of folks might disagree with that beacuse the best things in life are free, but I hate the Pop-ups and unders that your subject to in the "free" space.
Free hosters are not worth it... Most affiliate programs, customers, linking directories, etc... Will not allow "free hosted" places to be involved with them... Customers get annoyed with popups, you have 0 service... The best things is life are not always free... If your site is BS or Fun... then I say go for Free... but if its what you want to make any kind of living with it does you absolutely no good to waste your time and effort on a free host... There are very few "Free" things people believe anymore... Everyone wants stuff free, but they don't like what they can get for Free.. It took me 3 days and a lot of poking and prodding with our merchant partner because he swore that there was truly no catch to the free merchant account and authorize.net account... I didn't believe him, I argued, tried to trick him, pulled everything I could on him, and when I finally was convinced I promoted it with all I was worth... If you are happy with your hosting company (they do seem pretty good for the type of site you have) then I say good for you! Stick with 'em... Hosting companies are a dime a dozen... GOOD Hosting companies are gold in your hand ...
I definitely think stability is a key issue also. How long have they been around? The longer the track record, the better.
You're right about webhosting companies being a dime a dozen. I would almost bet that most people looking for a free webhosting account, aren't going to put much work or effort into the sites. You do see a lot of pages with close to nothing on them, under construction etc. I'm also sure a lot of folks that have websites use [b:31e1bab0df]"The invisible internet"[/b:31e1bab0df] that being the one without PR, SEO or any of the other goodies webmasters use to keep track of where they've been and where they are going.
IMHO as somebody already said YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR now for the rant !!! Web hosting is such a crowded business these days here are the rules I follow.. as there are just to many "hosters" out there to check them all (I am a hard core unix head so that gives you my bias right off the bat ) First of all why is hosting so "cheap". The main reason is apache webserver's ability to do name based virtual hosting i.e. many websites on a single machine. From the hosters point of view they buy a good box with loads of Hard-disk and big bandwidth. you can get a decent box for less than $300 a month with RAID arrays at that price. They then stuff it to the limit with "websites" and charge them $10 a month. I have seen a single machine with over 200-300 websites. Thats a gross turnover $3000 a month for an investment of $300 .. you do the math. The software is eassentially free (open source and good quality to boot) your overheads are support (paying good sys admins or buying cPanel/Ensim etc..) now on to my rules for choosing web hosters 1) does the hosted also offer dedicated servers/co-location services ? This means that they are somewhat more serious in the IT infrastructure game and they are not simply some kid in a garage who's got DSL and a linux box. 1a) do they own their own data centre are are they resellers ? same as above 2) do you have shell access to your account ? Again means they are serious and not simply reselling a cPanel Ensim account etc.etc.etc. i.e they have non-mouse based technical ability on an operating system level 3) do they allow you to do "non-standard" things if they are sensible ? (e.g. you have written a script to tar/gzip log files and ftp it off the box and you would like it cron'd ...would be a sensible request) again they should have the technical abality to see what is good /bad for their IT infrastructure 3a) do they offer anything technically different than LAMP ? (Linux, apache, MySql, PHP, Perl and Python ? if not then chances are they are simple a "me too!!" hoster. The operating system they use tell a lot about the type of hoster they are i.e. Micro$oft -> minions of the devil who can't function without a mouse Linux -> On the right path but too many in that herd, you really have to examine these guys to make sure they are not just resellers or "fly by nights". This is probably the best place to start and apply my other rules to them. Slackware/FreeBSD - etc... probably serious hosters Solaris -> must be good if they can afford Sun prices for their "heavy iron" 4) look at the sites they host and run it through www.netcraft.com "what's that site running" just by seeing the OS, Webserver and modules you can see how far behind the curve/up with it they are on current releases of components like apache for webservers, Linux kernel numbers etc... If they are way behind on a lot of components then how sure are you that they regularly apply patches to known bugs etc.. 4a) don't be fooled by all the "features" they give you .. any gimp can set up apache, perl, php, ftp etc... Heck if anybody wants to know how to do that stuff from src, look at my website www.smartframeworks.com/support.html 5) if you really want to get into the website game you should have your own dedicated machine. (by that I mean if your site is a commercial one ? and not just static information/school project/photo album kind of thing, for that I would think $10 month is enough). Dedicated servers are damn cheap these days <$100 per month gets you on the entry level probably with unmetered bandwidth. A serious website deserves $100 bucks a month and your time to design it properly. 5A) if you can't afford a dedicated box club together with other sites whom you know and trust. remember 1/10 of a dedicated box is the same price as the unwashed masses on most hosters machines pay. Remember hosters can put hundreds of simple websites on a single machine. That s why most of the hosters offers are touting the same stuff. please feel free to aggree/disagree as I like a good email thread.
There's very little to disagree with in your post. Very good advice.
yeah, that actually is an excellent post. pretty much it comes down to this: these days many people are simply a reseller of a reseller of a reseller. of course they use LAMP as its free. they then get a cheap control panel setup like ensim and off they go. for 99% of websites, this is sufficient. if you have a low impact web site with 1 or 2 gigs per month of data transer you should run into few problems. as your requirements go up, things get a little sketchier. i have a few control panel ensim servers and truth be told, they are a bit buggy. low on security, and flawed in the MySQL department. some major PHP scripts won't even run on them. more points to keep in mind.
I agree with Rob.. Kinda hard to disagree when you made excellent points all around... The bottom line ends up being .. who has the best services, support and functionality for a price you can afford... *shrug* No matter what no one company will ever be all you need in everything..
no such thing as a one size fits all webhost, that you can be sure of.. one mans diamond is anothers disaster.. :D
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