Planning: Web Hosting Services

Introduction
Like many business owners today, you may have decided that you need an Internet presence and, like many small business owners, you may have undertaken the development of your web site yourself. Now, having completed the development, you are trying to decide whether to run the site on your own server, or to contract it out to professionals. We believe we are your best choice for a hosted solution, and here is why:

Pay To Play
We are sure that you have found a number of companies that offer free web hosting services. We all know that nothing in life is ever truly free. Someone pays, somewhere, sometime. What you need to ask yourself is whether your prospective clients / customers are going to be happy with more spam, or pop advertising. Is your website, in which you have already invested hours, going to look better with embedded advertising over which you have little or no control. Probably not.

But the worst possibility will be that the really and truly free web hosting service disappears one day without warning. Taking your professional Internet presence with it.

By now we hope you have decided that paying for web hosting is a good idea. And you can expect to get what you pay for. You should select a service that will provide a range of packages so that you can pick the one that will best suit your needs but allow you to upgrade to additional services without significant downtime or expense. Remember, your business will look as professional to the customer as your web site looks, and first impressions are important.

A quick distinction. There are ISP companies that will provide hosting for your personal or small business pages. This means that your web site would be addressed as http://www.some-isp.com/~mycompany. Hosting with a professional service normally provides you with an Internet address like http://www.this-is-my-company.com/. Clearly the latter is more professional than the former.

Web Hosting Resources:
There are many places you can look for web hosting resources, the easiest is to do a couple of searches using Google or one (or more) of the other search engines. Because this information is so dynamic we have provided a couple of keywords and comments rather than static information.

  • Web Hosting Nightmares — This is a good one to search for. 'Nightmare' seems to be a common term for people complaining about their web hosting / net services company. Look for references to cable companies and telephone companies using things like 'poor service'. You'll find a lot, even referencing companies that generally do a good job.
  • Commercial Web Hosting — If you are looking for a company to host your business web site, a good bet is to go with a commercial operation. Yes, there are free services, but like we said above, you get what you pay for. Besides, even the commercial operations charge so little these days if you can't afford to pay for the services you probably shouldn't be in business.
  • Internet Web Hosting Options — Do a search for 'web hosting packages' and variations on that theme, you'll find a million options.
  • Free Web Hosting Solutions — As I tried to indicate above, while free services are all well and good and nice to have, and you can buy a lot of beer for $150, in the great scheme of things $150 a year for services is cheap insurance. And you'll still be able to afford the beer.
  • Free Web Page Hosting — Ditto Free Web Hosting Solutions.
  • Graphic Design Directories — Professional graphical design and layout is critical to a successful web site. You need to find someone who speaks the same language you do, as well as the same dialect. Ever tried asking someone to draw something for you and then described what you want drawn ? If you are talking to someone who is not on the same page this can be a very painful business.

    Try to find a graphic designer who will understand what message you are trying to convey to your customers / prospects. This will make the design process easier, faster and, ultimately cheaper and more rewarding.

Domain or Non-Virtual Account
This should be a no-brainer decision. You want your busines and web site to look professional. If you were searching for a patent lawyer and you had to choose between two links that were returned by your favourite search engine as http://www.geocities.com/websites/~patentlaw-us and http://www.uspatentservices.com/, which one would you click on first ? You probably wouldn't even give the first one a thought.

Again, as with hosting and professional services, this can be quite economical. There are registrars that will charge as little as $9 per year for some domains. Other domains can cost as much as $70 per year. It all has to do with the amount of competition there is for that particular top level domain (TLD). This is less than the price of your daily cup of coffee.

Hosting Services
What to look for in a hosting service:

  • There are very few web sites that require more than 5 - 10 Megabytes, and these are probably too graphical. Don't pay for storage space you don't need.
  • Access to CGI-BIN. If you want to install your own server scripts, and many providers now provide access to a lot of scripts that are already tested for security, you'll need to have access to a CGI-BIN directory. Most hosting services provide you with your own scripting directory in addition to providing access to the general scripts that they provide.
  • eMmail accounts. You want people emailing you to be emailing to you@yourdomain.com. Not you@yourisp.com, which isn't very professional. Make sure the hosting service provides this capability. Furthermore, you should probably get a minimum of 5 real eMail addresses included in your hosting package in addition to unlimited aliases. Aliases use very little resource but can be very useful, especially in the fight against spam. Look for a host that will provide you 10 - 20MB of email (pop3) mailbox and not limit a single email size to 1MB, which barely handles a couple of attachments these days.
  • Autoresponders are a very handy tool to take care of prospective customers, and real customers, when you are not available. Perhaps your on an airplane, or on holiday. You want your mail server to be able to respond as quickly as possible to incoming mail as a courtesy to let people know when to expect a real response.
  • Statistical packages, awstats is probably the most widely used today, will tell you who is visiting your web site, from where, how frequently and what they are reading and ignoring. This is very valuable marketing feedback and will help you tune your website and focus your business.
  • Some hosting companies can provide you with a boilerplate web site or complete design services if you don't want to be learning how to design and develop your own website. It is good practice for a business owner to focus on his / her core business and to let other specialists provide the services they need to be successful so, unless you have a lot of spare time (and if you are in the startup phase there is no such thing as spare time), and want to learn how to develop web sites, contracting a specialist is a good idea.
  • Make sure that the company you are going to contract with will have someone on the other end of the telephone, on the weekend and in the evening, when you call because you need support.
  • Lots of hosting companies boast 100% uptime. Even today, when everything is backed up, mirrored and far more reliable than in the early days, 100% uptime is improbable. 99% is an acceptable level !
  • Many companies (most) allocate you a specific amount of bandwidth (traffic). It is unlikely that you will cross their boundaries in the early days, but use the statistics package to keep track of what you are using. Good hosting companies will warn you when you are approaching the limits that will result in additional charges.
  • If you are planning on providing web design services, you may want to enter into some kind of commissioning arrangement with your service provider for providing referrals to your clients.

There are many other things to consider. eCommerce options (shopping carts), content management systems (CMS), Microsoft FrontPage extensions, server scripts pre-installed, spam filters for the mail server and remote access to name but a few.

Transferring Files
It used to be that FTP (file transfer protocol) was the only way to load files onto your web server. While FTP is probably still the most widely used method it is generally hidden below a user interface for file transfer / site management built into your web site development application. Macromedia's MX suite contains such a utility.

However, it should be noted that there are other options that include direct Microsoft network access and WebDAV, a network access module provided by a number of web servers including Apache and IIS. Be aware though that the easier these file transfer systems are to use, the less secure they generally are and the more exposed your web site is to hackers.

  • Host Address (this is the URL that you are sending your files to) — In order to use a file transfer program you will need to know the address / name of your web server and have a login. You will also need to know which folder (directory) is known to the web server daemon to be the 'document root' folder.
  • User ID — This will be assigned you by your service provider. You may have some option to pick the one you would prefer. These days it is almost always set to your eMail address automatically.
  • Password — You may be provided a temporary password initially. In any event, proper password management would dictate that you set your own password and change it frequently.
  • Initial Remote Directory (this is the folder you will be placing your files into) — In server terms this is referred to as the document root
  • Initial Local Directory (this is the folder your files are stored in on your hard drive) — This is where you have saved your web site on your local workstation
  • Host-Type (most FTP programs will detect this automatically) — Most web services are provided on Unix based hosts. Many are now provided on Microsoft windows operating systems of some kind. There really isn't any need to worry about this setting.

If you need to look for an FTP program, just go to Google and do a search for 'ftp client'. There are many free, open source, shareware and commercial programs available. WS FTP is a program that I have used in the past and, when I need one, is the first program I look for. It is quick, efficient and has a lot of features and a very easy to use interface plus it still allows you to enter FTP commands directly.