Choosing a host is an important decision. You will, hopefully, have a long relationship
with whatever host you choose. To make the decision you need to first decide what
you need and then visit the sites of several hosting providers and evaluate what
they have to offer in the light of your requirements . If you choose wisely you
should get good value for money, reliability and prompt, knowledgeable support.
Deciding What You Need
Unix or NT?
Whether you need to be hosted on a Unix or NT server depends largely on what
you plan to do with your site. For most people starting out a Unix server is
a good choice but if you plan to use databases or ASP on your site then you
will need NT hosting.
Free or Paid?
For a first (or practice) site or for a personal site, free hosting can be
a good solution. You will almost certainly have to put up with some ads on your
site, cannot expect too much in the way of support and there will usually be
restrictions on using scripts, on bandwidth and on disk space. That said many
free hosts have good online support or forums where you will find other users
willing to help. You may also find that the servers tend to be slow at times
which will affect users of your site.
For business sites free hosting is really a no-no. Partly because of the ads,
over which you have little control, partly because you will have an unwieldy
domain name to deal with, such as www.thefreehost.com/usersites/yoursite/, but
mainly because it projects a poor image of the business. If a business cannot
afford the small amount of money it costs for paid hosting, often less than
$150 per year, it is difficult to expect potential customers to take them seriously.
FrontPage Extensions
If you are planning to use any of the features in FrontPage that depend on
extensions then you must choose a host that provides extensions. Better again
get some recommendations from existing FrontPage users, as a start try a search
for 'hosting' or 'server extensions' in the Outfront Forums.
Some hosts are undoubtedly more enthusiastic than others in their provision
of extensions. With the best you will have no problems, with the less than expert
you will find that extensions fail or become corrupted regularly and that help
may be less than forthcoming.
How much Disk Space and Bandwidth?
How much disk space you need will depend both on how large you expect your
site to become and on the nature of the site itself. For example a Flash site,
or one making extensive use of video, audio or large graphics would need more
space than one that is mainly text based.
For most new sites the needs are relatively modest. Statistically the average
website is less than 5MB and being swayed to a more expensive hosting plan because
of a large disk space allocation may not be a great idea if you are paying for
space you will never use. Make sure that there is a means of upgrading your
plan should your needs change in the future.
Unless your site is likely to be extremely busy from the outset or you are
making heavy use of Flash, video or audio you are unlikely to need more than
the standard bandwidth provided with an 'off the shelf' hosting plan. In general
as the disk space allocated increases so does the bandwidth.
Individual Requirements
All sites have slightly different requirements and thus there is no 'one plan
fits all' solution. Make a list of those feature that are most important to
you and use this when comparing hosts.
For example do you need the latest version of Perl, PHP Support, a large number
of POP accounts, access to a secure server or to MySQL? Perhaps things like
a toll free support number matter more, or whether there is a free shopping
cart provided with your hosting. It is important to get your requirements clear
so that when you compare hosts you are comparing like with like.
Part II - Types
of Hosting Service
