Hosting Tips

You'll find many web hosting options for your site. Many of them are good. Some bad. Some are overpriced, some underpowered. It's also possible to host a website yourself, but it's not advisable unless you have experience configuring a server and keeping it secure. You also may not have the proper contract with your Internet Service Provider for hosting your own site.

You want to host with somebody where it's mostly hands-off, where the security updates are done systematically and where you have a team working if things go down for maintenance or other things. I've talked to too many people whose site went down for a week because the guy hosting it was working on some stuff. Compare that to many of the mainstream hosts that are down for maybe a couple hours an entire year.

It's helpful to put your website in one of three categories.

Types of sites (project scale)

Simple site, a few static pages

This would be the site with 5 pages and links to contact you. This type of site is used by all forms of businesses, big and small. Just because your company has 40 employees doesn't mean that your site is going to be swamped. This type of site usually means your needs are small. If you are spending more than $10 a month on this type of site hosting, you can probably get a better deal. You can host a site like this for about $75 / Year including the website domain name.

Medium size site, powered by content management system.

People host all types of content this way, photo galleries, videos, even shopping carts. This uses a customized off-the-shelf content management system and if it has a shopping cart, the web host may already provide it. There's a range of prices for these sites, but if you are paying over $35 / month, you can probably do better for less as long as you aren't getting thousands of transactions a day. Even a host charging just $15 a month can provide you with plenty of storage, plenty of options for CMS content management systems and shopping cart options for a reasonable price.

Keep in mind that with the economical hosts you just want to take advantage of the security options, such as SSL encryption and a security certificate so your shopping cart transactions are safe for your visitors.

Large corporate site

If you have this kind of site, you are doubtfully even reading this. But let's just say that this kind of site has custom everything, website framework, shopping carts. Thousand's of transactions a month go through this type of site. Even so, you can host an extremely robust type of site if you fall in the middle of this category. Media Temple would be a good choice. But plan on paying 600-1200 / year for this type of setup, or on up to 18-30 thousand bucks depending on the kind of database infrastructure you have. Again, if you need that, yo probably aren't reading this site. I'm just giving a perspective for you here.

Those little extras that are nice.

If your site falls in the middle, where you need flexibility, hosts tend to differ slightly on what they offer out of the box and what is extra. The problem is, the extra stuff, you didn't know you needed or wanted might double your price per year. It depends.

Things to look for out of the box:

SSL - this allows for secure website transactions when you submit forms to the site
Domain contact info hiding - I'm not sure the actual name for this, but instead of displaying your contact info in the Domain Whois directory, it just shows a generic hosting name, address, and email. It eliminates spam to your inbox essentially and not everyone will do this out of the box. It's nice to have.
Scripting support - Look for PHP or ASP available on the server. Also look for CGI, Python, Ruby or other scripting languages that can be used to create forms or other dynamic functions in your pages.
MySQL or PostgreSQL databases for storing dynamic data
Built in shopping carts - Look for this because it can make it so much easier to install a little shop. Some hosts really pay attention to this type of functionality and help you get up and running.