Choosing a Web Host
Your choice of web host can have long term implications for your web site. Hosting solutions range in price from free to hundreds of dollars per month.
Free Hosting
You can get free hosting from several places like Blogger or Wordpress, and for some blogs free hosting may be a good or even great idea. However, free hosting always has some strings attached, because after all someone has to pay for it. Often your use of bandwidth, storage or your ability to monetize will be limited in some way. Free host services will almost always limit you in your choice of domains and you will have to use a subdomain or folder of the host domain. For example if you host your blog on www.freehost.com your URL will look like www.yourblog.freehost.com or www.freehost.com/yourblog/. Either way it is far less brandable than www.yourdomain.com and you may or may not be able to sell it and most likely you won’t be able to move your site without just starting over. So, if you are planning to be successful, and making money from your web site you should seriously consider paying for hosting. One exception that I know of is Google Blogger - you can use free hosting on blogger for your own domain name. Click here to find out how. If you go this route, and you later decide to change hosts you will be able to easily and seamlessly do so.
Cheap Hosting
A quick Google search for “cheap hosting” turns up a bewildering number of choices for hosting that go as low as a dollar and ninety nine cents per month. However, I would caution you to do a bit of research before whipping out the plastic. I actually do recommend that you start out your fledgling Internet business venture on an economical web host. But it’s important that you choose a host that will allow you to easily do what you need, and that will give you a reasonable level of support for when you hit a snag. Usually you’re going to pay a little bit more for better features.
Key Features of an Economical Web Host
- Reliability – cheap isn’t a good deal if your site is down a lot.
- Scalability – will you be able to upgrade service as your business grows?
- Ability to redirect – sooner or later you will need to be able to move a resource, and if you can edit your htaccess file (or equivalent) this will be easier and less painful.
- Support for your Content Management System – Many hosting services now have “one click” installation available for blog software (like WordPress), shopping carts, and other software that you don’t even know that you need yet.
- Add On Domains – this feature means that you can host many domains (completely separate websites or blogs) on the same hosting plan – usually without any extra fees. This feature allows you to incubate a site and age the URL for less than ten dollars per year for the domain registration. Many of the cheaper services don’t allow (or fully support) add on domains.
Drawbacks of Economy Hosting
- Internet scammers and spammers often use cheap hosting services to ply their trade, so if your website just happens to be hosted on the same service as those bad guys then Google could (in theory) penalize you. It’s hard to tell if this is really true or not, because exactly how Google ranks a website is top secret, but a lot of SEO professionals seem to believe that it is true. Personally it’s hard for me to believe that Google is that unsophisticated.
- If you suddenly get tons of traffic, your economy-hosted site might crash. This is the kind of problem that you might wish you had, but if it does happen will make you sick as you imagine all of those people getting an error screen. Normal traffic growth will give you signs that you are outgrowing your hosting package. If you are getting a lot of traffic your site performance (page loading) will gradually slow down when your site is busy, and you will know that you need to do something. However, if you get featured on a social networking site (Digg for example) you could suddenly get tens of thousands of visitors in just a few hours, your economy hosting will crash, and all of that traffic will go elsewhere. The same thing could happen if Oprah or some other celebrity was to mention you. Personally, unless you are planning on intentionally trying to make this happen, I don’t think you should worry about it too much until you have a reasonable amount of normal traffic. The kind of hosting service that you need to cruise smoothly through “The Digg Effect” costs thousands of dollars per year, and just isn’t called for if you are bootstrapping your first web site. Also, in my limited experience the surge of traffic that you get from social network sites isn’t worth all that much – they don’t click on adds, and they don’t really result in many repeat visits. However, it is exposure, which is valuable.
Like many decisions, your choice of hosting is going to be a trade off between economy and performance. If you choose well, you get value, so do your homework and make your decision.
By the way, I use lunarpages.com for my hosting and am very satisfied with their service.
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