What Kind of Web Hosting Services?
A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Frances Rhea
Three Basic Web Hosting Services
The kind of site you build plays a big part in which web hosting services you chose. These are divided between personal (a site to describe you, your family, or your pet), informational (promotion of a business), and transactional (where you conduct business transactions). There are pluses and minuses for each type of site.
Personal Web Hosting Services
A hosting service for you should be free or less than $5 per month. If you don't mind banner ads, free is the way to go. If you want your own domain name anyway and multiple e-mail accounts, then you it will cost for your hosting services.
Tools and templates on free hosting make it easy to create your pages. If you choose paid shared hosting, your design choices expand, but you will need the skill required such as a knowledge of HTML.
Personal Hosting Drawbacks
Personal sites (especially free hosting) provides between 2MB to 50MB of space. This is more than enough for most sites. At this level, you may get tech support by e-mail, but no instant response. With a personal site, support and reliability are not essential even though it can be annoying if your site is unavailable for a day or two.
Informational Web Hosting Services
Web hosting for an informational site is easy to manage and maintain. A small business can host a site for $5 per month.
The requirements are not much greater than a personal site would require unless you have lots of words, images, sound files, or video for visitors to download.
If you have a large company, you will want multiple e-mail accounts so everyone can receive messages through your domain. You will also want visitors to contact you, so cgi/Perl handling of Web forms is essential.
While security is important, it is less essential than for an e-commerce site that needs to protect credit card information.
You need live 24/7 support. Ask who provides support before you commit to hosting.
Transactional Web Hosting Services
If you sell products or services on the Web, you can expect to pay for web hosting services. If e-commerce is your main source of revenue, get the best hosting solution affordable. This can be as low as $10 per month to tens of thousands of dollars.
If your web site is successful, it will have high-traffic. The number of catalog items will determine the storage you need. Purchase the most you can get that is affordable. If you run out of space you can upgrade your hosting services to a larger package.
Your host must have services such as SSL, a firewall, and intrusion detection. You will also need hourly or instant backup of your files to prevent loss.
You need immediate, 24/7 personalized service. This is mandatory. If you experience a problem, you will need to be able to resolve it quickly so that you do not loose revenue.
Don't forget a shopping cart and merchant services which are additional fees.
