Silent partners: Selecting a web hosting company
Laptop Battery By Troy Janisch • 08/08/05
To about web hosting, //en.wikipedia. Web_hosting Shared Hosting This is a common process of hosting your website. In this process, you get space for your website in hosting company’s server. a number of web pages of several organizations are stored in the same web server. based contents, designs, and applications visible as well as accessible from other computers, which are connected to the Internet. End users can easily download the websites via their web browsers.
Thinkpad Web hosting companies are the "silent partners" of every online
business. A good partner makes going online a
natural extension of your business.
A bad one
costs you time, money, and
customers.
How many customers are they serving per server Depending on the Web hosting plan or the Web hosting company the server that your hosted on might be a little more packed than you might think. A responsible Web hosting company will not overstuff the servers they own or collocate. Most of the time, sharing a server with several different companies is not a bad thing though. However, you do need to ask your Web hosting company about the numbers. If you are shopping around for Web hosting, you need to ask each company about the client per server ratio. Go with the company that fits your other needs, and has the least amount of clients per Web hosting server.
Microsoft An important part of doing business online is finding the right
web host - the company that provides you with the server space,
database and internet connectivity you need to share a site with
the world.
Location, location, location
From a customer's perspective, the geographic location of your web
host provider isn't important. Whether it is located within 30
miles or 3,000 miles doesn't matter if it is providing a good
connection to the Internet. National providers tend to create
generic hosting environments to maximize their economies of scale.
That means if your website doesn't require "anything special," you
can often find
cost savings with a reliable national provider.
The least expensive is shared hosting with hundreds of web sites all sharing a single, very large hard drive. The really big sites employ dedicated servers. One company. One server. In between these two options is virtual private servers, or VPS, perhaps the most misunderstood of the three broad categories of web host services. VPS is less expensive (much less) than a dedicated or private server, line business than shared hosting.
Laptop Computers From a business perspective, local web host providers offer some
advantage - particularly if your company's knowledge of networking
and Internet technology is limited.
established web hosting provider sometimes hosts up to thousands of websites. For that reason, a web hosting company need many web servers (essentially, these are computers) to store the website. And all these web servers are connected to the Internet through high speed Internet connection and housed in a physical building called data center In order to guarantee all the web servers are safe, secure and fully operational all time, 7 environment with fire protection, virus detections, computer data backup, redundant power backup and complete disaster recovery capabilities.
Laptop Computer Local providers usually provide their customers with higher
levels of support and accountability than national providers. Local
providers tend to have a more intimate business relationship with
their customers. Local providers know what their clients' goals and
objectives are for their web presence, and they can design,
implement and support Internet solutions that better meet the needs
of those clients.
> Choosing a Web Hosting Plan Choosing a Web Hosting Plan Overview There are approximately 100 million Web sites on the Internet. They are "hosted" on computers (called web servers) all over the world. The web server (computer) where your Web site's information, photos, etc. reside, may be located in a home or office, but ideally, in a secure data center, and maintained by a "web host" (like WestHost). Web hosting clients simply upload their Web sites to either a shared web server (where many other clients are also hosting), or a dedicated web server (where the entire server is their own), which the web host maintains to ensure the Web site is always available, and can be accessed quickly (a fast download).
Desktop Computer National providers tend to be less
personal and less responsive
than local providers. It's not uncommon for it to take 24-48
hours before a support request is resolved.
Notebooks There are many free hosting services available on the Internet.
If you're designing a website for business purposes, never host
your website with a free host.
Service, service, service
You can't overestimate the importance of service when it comes to
selecting a location to host a website or an off-site server. If
your website is complex or an essential part of your company's
day-to-day business, it's probably the most important factor to
consider.
Lenovo "Service is everything in the ISP business," said Bryan Chan,
president of SupraNet. "Internet services do not run by themselves.
Your ISP should be passionately dedicated to the success of its
clients."
Hard Drive The best way to determine the level of service that a web host
company provides is to talk with other businesses that use its
service. Web host companies should provide you with references of
businesses that use their services that have similar needs to those
of your company. It's important to call the references.
Travelstar Ask the following questions: How long have you been with the
provider? How many unscheduled outages have you had with your
provider? How timely are technical support issues dealt with? How
accurate is the ISP's billing? What procedures are in place when
dealing with customer service issue? How long do you have to wait
on-hold when you call for support?
Gateway Read the fine print. Specifically, read a web hosting company's
service level agreement (SLA) to see what it is actually
guaranteeing. Does its SLA go beyond network availability? Does it
provide a service level for responding to technical or customer
support issues? Does it monitor and evaluate your website's
availability? Does it support complex or specialized
applications?
Now featuring
Any competent ISP should be able to host the site in either the
Windows or UNIX environment. However, there are some basic features
to look for when selecting any web host:
24/7 technical support
Your own domain name (www.yoursite.com)
10GB or more of monthly transfer (traffic)
A minimum of 20MB - 50MB of server space
Unlimited POP email accounts - name@yoursite.com
Unlimited email aliases
Email forwarding
Unlimited autoresponders
Access to SSL Encryption for secure transactions
MySQL or SQL Server Database
htaccess password protection
Server Side Includes (SSI) support
Unlimited free access to your server via FTP/Telnet
Easy access to your log files
Statistics on visits to your site
Live long and prosper
Stability and experience are important when seeking a web host.
Web hosting companies with a history of providing reliable service
and a health client list should always be selected over less
experienced hosting providers. Experienced providers solve problems
faster than inexperienced providers. They also cause fewer ones.
Laptop Parts Ask several questions that help you determine the web host's
stability: How long has the ISP been in business? Is the company
profitable? Does it have enough clients to support its own
infrastructure or does it oversubscribe its bandwidth in order to
maximize profits?
Software In addition to requesting client references, it's often a good
idea to request financial references. You can also call business
contacts who are online and ask them who they use for web hosting
services and how their experiences have been. That's a great way to
find out about companies to be avoided based on the bad experiences
that peers have had.
Hard Drives It can be a lot of work initially to find the right provider.
However, the work you put in up-front will be offset by the service
of a good web host provider.
Electronics Troy Janisch is president and founder of the Icon Interactive
Group (www.iconinteractive.com), an industry leader helping
companies integrate Internet and other Interactive media into sales
channels, marketing strategies, and overall branding. He can be
contacted by email at tjanisch@iconinteractive.com.
The opinions expressed herein or statements made in the above
column are solely those of the author, & do not necessarily
reflect the views of Wisconsin Technology Network, LLC. (WTN). WTN,
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