www.thewebtailor.co.uk
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www.thewebtailor.co.uk |
Are you a reseller for someone else or do you own your own hardware?
Web hosting is now big business. Everyone wants a piece of the action. As a result, some of the bigger hosting operations have come up with a way to get other people doing the hard work for them: resellers. A reseller buys a hosting contract from a host, and then parcels it up into smaller chunks (less hard disc space, fewer e-mail addresses, lower bandwidth, for example) and sells on those chunks to other clients.
Many web designers have taken advantage of this trend to become resellers themselves, thus able to offer 'design and host' packages. They're sometimes marginally cheaper than paying different people to design and host your site, but there are several drawbacks, not least of which is that you forfeit the chance to choose a host who actually suits you.
In general, it pays to be hosted by the genuine article. If your site goes down because of a server failure, you want to be able to contact the technical team who are actually working at putting it right, not just a go-between who doesn't necessarily know what went wrong in the first place.
But if you have a very small site, and don't need extras like scripting support or multiple logins, you may find that true webhosting companies are charging you for facilities you don't need. In this situation, you may be better off with a reseller. But shop around before you decide.
How much do you charge for space?
Clearly, the objective is to get the most space for your website files, for the least money.
But things aren't entirely that simple. Hundreds of megabytes of space which you're not using on a server with slow connections is not good value, even if it is cheap. In discussion with your web designer, try to work out how much space you actually need. Small, static sites will probably fit comfortably into 5Mb or 10Mb if you are using any images or photographs. Even quite complex sites are unlikely to need more than 50Mb unless they contain a lot of features that grow as they are used, such as discussion forums or databases that visitors to your site can add content to.
Once you know how much space you are likely to need (include a bit for growth and development) you are ready to ask for quotes from your shortlist of potential web hosts.
Don't forget to also ask about the charges for extra space: if your site develops with time you may need to expand, so it is a good idea to know how easy, and how expensive, this will be.
The bottom line is that space is cheap. It is bandwidth that costs.
What are your limits on bandwith?
There are two bandwidth limits that you need to be aware of.
The first is the limit imposed by the hosting company on the amount of data that they will deliver to visitors to your site. If, for instance, you have ten pages on your website, and each page is approximately 10k in size. If you have five visitors to your home page in a day, the hosting computer has to serve up 50k of data. If each visitor looks at every page on your site, that figure increases to 500k.
The more visitors you expect, and the more data you expect each of them to request (not just pages, remember, but graphics and any multimedia files included on your site) then the more bandwidth you need.
Many web hosts will allow you to specify the bandwidth in your hosting contract, and some will enable you to purchase additional bandwidth when you need it. Be aware, though, that some hosts will only sell you additional bandwidth if you buy additional disc space - which you may not need.
Also be wary of hosts that promise 'unlimited' bandwidth. They cannot deliver, because the equipment they use has a maximum bandwidth - so sooner or later you will reach a limit, whether you've been told about it or not, and then your host might get aggressive. Even if you don't hit a limit, what about the other websites hosted on the same computer as yours? If they are all very busy, making the most of the 'unlimited' bandwidth, the access speeds to your site will suffer.
This is because of the impact of the second limitation on bandwidth, the one imposed by the physical capacities of the equipment being used by the hosting company.
Every step that your data has to travel in order to get from your website to your visitor's computer has a maximum capacity - usually in terms of the amount of data that can be transmitted in a certain amount of time. Every website hosted on a particular computer has to share the available bandwidth between that computer and the internet - which might be anything from a 56k modem upwards! Every visitors' request - and the data being returned to them - has to squeeze through that capacity.
So you need a web host that doesn't pack too many sites onto each server, or too many servers onto each connection to the net.
What Operating Systems are available?
There are basically two styles of web hosting available: Unix and Windows.
Like most historical wars and conflicts, few of the belligerents in the Unix v Windows gunfight can explain what the issues are, but almost everyone knows which side they're on.
Unix systems tend to be more reliable, they often include support for open source or free software applications, and they tend to be favoured by IT experts, since the management of a Unix system relies on typing commands into the computer one line at a time (known as the 'command line' for some reason).
Windows systems are more appealing to the uninitiated since the interface is likely to be familiar to anyone with a Windows PC at home. However, the Windows services tend to be more expensive than their Unix equivalents, and in some cases they can be less reliable.
Since you will probably not want to spend too much of your time configuring your web server anyway (between your web designer and your hosting company, someone else should be able to do most of what you need), and since you want to maximise your options for the smallest cash outlay, you will probably be better off with a Unix option.
Unix gurus can explain to you all the different varieties of Unix available, and which one is the 'best' (but they can't agree, seemingly), but you shouldn't waste too much time on this, unless you want to become a geek yourself.
The best option is probably to find a host that offers both Unix and Windows hosting, and then discuss with the hosting company themselves, and your web designer, which operating system will best suit your particular project.
What features are supported or available?
If you're the kind of person who likes talking in acronyms, this is the bit for you.
There are a whole array of different features that a web hosting account can include - some of which you will need, and most of which you won't. But working out which ones are which depends on the type of website you are creating it, what functions you want it to perform, and the personal preferences of the people actually doing the work.
The first set of options to consider are the programming languages you might want to use on the site. If you've got scripts or other programmes running your website, and the language they are written in is not installed on your server, then your website won't work.
No one website is going to need them all, and there's no point paying a webhost to provide technical support for twenty possible scripting languages if your site doesn't use them, but you don't want to limit your options too much should you decide in the future to start building in some interactivity - the kind of thing that requires programming rather that static HTML pages.
Almost every hosting package includes support for CGI - common gateway interface programmes - and the perl language - it's the most common on the web. Also common, and worth asking about is support for PHP (or Microsoft's Active Server Pages if you are going down the Windows hosting route). You should also ensure that your host allows you to use Server Side Includes (SSIs) - a kind of mini-programming technique which can be used to make web pages more consistent and easier to maintain.
If you want a database on your site (which you will need if you're setting up an on-line shop, or even a relatively low key information-based site if you want it to be fast and searchable) then the choice of Operating System determines what else to ask for. On Windows systems you need an ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) application server, like that for Allaire's ColdFusion or Pervasive's Tango. These will have cost your host money, so expect this to hike up your hosting contract. On the Unix side, things are cheaper (even free) but require greater programming skill to use, so expect cheaper hosting but possibly more web design time. The feature to look for here is support for MySQL, which is an open source (i.e. you don't have to pay for it) database technology. PHP is the most common language for writing programmes to use MySQL databases, so make sure your hosting contract includes support for it.
The second issue when considering your wish-list of web hosting features is email. Most web hosts include some email accounts or 'mailboxes' (often called POP3 boxes after the protocol they use to store and deliver mail) in their packages, although some do not. If you want to have email addressed to you as you@yourcompany.co.uk then this is how to do it. The options are simple. You can have real accounts set up on the host's server, which you access directly for mail, either using your usual email client software, or via your web browser from a 'webmail' screen on the host's website. Or you can have email forwarding, where you create fake email addresses that the hosts computer passes on to your real e-mail address for you to collect as normal. Or you can create aliases where several different names all point to the same POP3 mailbox. Or you can do a combination of all three. A typical small business probably could get by with just email forwarding, continuing to use your current e-mail provider. If you don't have an email provider, check with the host whether the POP3 accounts you are getting with your website include access to an outgoing mail server as well - not all of them do, many hosts assume you will continue to use your previous mail provider for sending mail, and only use the new POP3 boxes for incoming mail. Larger organisations may want to set up several POP3 accounts, and have some of them aliased to give sales@ourcompany.co.uk, customerservice@ourcompany.co.uk and so on - these could, in truth, all point to the same mailbox, but the visitor to your site can't tell that, and it helps to make you look like a bigger and more structured organisation.
Once you've sorted out the databases and your email requirements, if there is any money left in your budget you can consider the fancy stuff. Web statistics are often provided, either in raw traffic logs of the visitors accessing your sites, or interpreted in some way. There are as many different ways to interpret stats as there are web hosts, so expect to see a variety of stats screens. You might consider support for the Python programming language, Real Audio streaming for 'live' sound files, and support for streaming video technology.
The final set of features concerns e-commerce, which will obviously only be of interest if you intend to sell on-line. Many web hosts can now offer packages that include secure server space (known as SSL or secure socket layer) and most will try to sell you their 'merchant software' too, although your web designer may know a better way to do it, and can almost certainly save you money by using free or open source e-commerce software.
Also check what backup arrangements the web hosts make, both of their setup and of your data so that you know how difficult or easy it would be to recreate the site if their hardware got burned to the ground, or destroyed in some other fashion.
What support arrangements do you have?
Your website is functioning 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The internet is truly 24hour space, because it is being accessed by people all around the world at all times of your local day or night.
Just because you are at home in bed, shouldn't stop people in Japan or Australia visiting your site. That means that you need 24 hours a day / 7 days a week monitoring and support from your web host. After all, if their equipment goes down, you need to be able to speak to them at once, and make alternative arrangements to get your site back on-line as soon as possible.
If your site goes down at 6pm on a Friday night in the UK, even if you get it back up again first thing Monday morning you've lost valuable time, and lost credibility with everyone who tried to visit your site in the meantime. It is too important to risk.
Most web hosts offer support by e-mail, and by telephone. The better ones now offer on-line live support through 'chat' (where you and the support engineer can type messages to each other in real time), and this is increasingly popular in the USA - making US-based hosts more attractive sometimes than their UK counterparts. Support provided on a website usually is pretty limited, and should not be relied upon. If the hosting company won't give you direct phone numbers or email addresses for support engineers, then go somewhere else.
More important than the web hosts' advertised support, though, is the real experiences of their customers. Seek out clients of your prospective host, and ask them about the responsiveness of the support team.
There are discussion groups on the internet devoted to examining the performance of web hosts, and these are a great place to look for 'real life' experiences to base your decision on.
What networking arrangements have you made?
Your target in choosing a hosting arrangement should be to reduce the number of 'hops' that your data takes to get from your server to your visitor's PC. This is because each hop - each movement of data across a device like a router, or a switch - slows down the data, and risks corrupting it.
To accomplish this you need to have your web site as close as possible (in data connectivity terms) to the Network Access Points - where traffic is exchanged between the different UK Internet Service Providers. Since you cannot control the distance from the NAP to the visitor's computer, you have to concentrate on getting your website hosted as close to the NAP as possible.
In practice things are more complicated.
For a start, different visitors approach your site over different paths, and via different Network Access Points. The main UK NAP is LINX in London, but there are others that are also well-used: ManAP, ScotIX and LoNAP, for example. An ideal situation would be a host that had direct or near direct connections to all of these, as well as some private peering (direct exchanges between two networks, not routed through a public NAP) with major Internet networks. You are trying to cover all the bases, and get your site as close as possible to your visitor, whereever they may be.
You also want to know what arrangements are made for 'redundant' connections, backup in case the main link to the Internet is lost. Web hosts that only have one 'upline' to the internet are putting all their eggs in one basket, even if the bandwidth on that one connection is generous.
Where are your servers physically based?
The discussion of network connectivity above assumed that your visitors were an unknown quantity - but this is rarely the case.
Most organisations can predict where their visitors will come from, and even those that can't can examine their traffic logs once the site is functioning.
This gives you an additional way to improve the perceived performance of your website for your visitors - move the site to be hosted near to them.
If the majority of your visitors or users are going to be from the UK, then it makes sense to have a host based in the UK, with high bandwidth connections to major UK NAPs and private peering with other UK service providers. But if your visitors come mostly from the USA, the biggest improvement in the perceived performance of your site might come from hosting it in the US - because the cross-Atlantic connections are something of a bottleneck for the internet currently, and likely to remain so for several years to come. There's no point hosting a site in the UK if your visitors are all from the far east, either; take your site to them, and speed up their access times for them. Your visitors will be grateful, and grateful visitors come back.
The other things to ask about the physical location of the servers are the security and reliability considerations. Is the building purpose-built for hosting web servers? If not, are the power supplies adequate, and reliable enough? What are the chances of the server being moved around a lot, taken off-line or stolen?
A web host that hasn't considered issues like this is possibly not the organisation for you to give your money to.
What if something goes wrong?
There are various disaster scenarios to keep you awake at night, and various steps the web hosting company can take to help you get a relaxing night's sleep.
Crucially, they must take regular backups of the data on your site, and of their system, so that they can replace a machine with a broken hard drive without having to painstakingly re-install the operating system, and so that you don't have to then upload all your files all over again.
This doesn't mean that you don't need to take backups of the site for yourself, though. You must. What if the webhost goes bankrupt? By the time you've found out what's happened your website might have been wiped and the server sold off to someone untraceable. Take backups. Regularly. Especially if your site has dynamic content like discussion groups or a guestbook. You will never be able to replace that content if your site has to be rebuilt from scratch, so if it is important, take backups.
But your host should have a backup programme in place too.
They should also have redundant hardware. Ideally every piece of equipment should be running in parallel - mirrored hard disks so that an error on the disk doesn't mean your data is lost, duplicate connections around the network and out to the internet so that a mistakenly removed cable doesn't spell the end of your website, and at least two routes out to the internet through different uplink providers so that a dispute with one doesn't take all your webhost's servers off-line.
To find a host that takes that much care, and has that much money to invest in spare equipment and facilities that it isn't actually using - may cost more than you can afford, but you should expect your host to at least have contingency plans, arrangements it can put in place in an emergency to reconnect its servers to the net should its router or hub break down.
Beyond the scope of this document, but also important, is the question of network security. All web hosts should have active security policies, and strategies in place to prevent breaches of security, detect them if they ocurr and rectify any resulting damage. But some don't. You can get an idea about how seriously your prospective web host treats this problem by asking whether they have a security policy, how they monitor that it is being carried out, and whether you can have a copy of it. Anything less than two "yes" answers sandwiching a convincing and detailed explanation is a clue to move elsewhere.
How long have you been trading?
If you still want your web host to be here in six months' time (and you do, especially if you're paying for a year up front) then it helps to know that they've been around for a few months already.
It's not always true that the oldest hosts are the best, newer hosting operations may have newer equipment, newer skills and even a fresher, more helpful approach to their customers that means they are going to put their more established rivals to the test.
But even in the fast-moving internet world, there is a certain level of inertia, and established companies are more likely to survive than new ones are.
Get a feel for how long your prospective hosts have been trading, and whether they've been doing other things before that, or alongside it. You may find that they're really a computer retailer or an internet cafe, that's trying to make a bit more money by renting out spare disk space to website owners: not the most reliable of arrangements.
Want more?
If you still can't decide which web host to use, there is more information on this topic at www.uk-hosting.org.uk, an excellent site for helping in sorting out the quality web hosts from the rest.
Any comments?
These pages are intended to be informative and helpful. I would like to know if you've found them helpful, or if you think they can be improved. Get in touch if you have comments or suggestions.
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