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Audience: This guide is useful if you have decided to do-it-yourself, directly purchasing a web hosting plan on which you plan to build your web site yourself. If you are using a web services agency like Walking Dolphins Consultancy the article will be only of interest.
The Secure Surfing Organization itself is hosted by the Wired Web Press Network, which is in turn a unit of Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc.
Walking Dolphins works with many hosting companies and through that experience we are able to provide good general overviews of the considerations in choosing a host.
The most significant cost in having your own web site is not the money to pay to register your domain name or the hosting fees you pay. It is the time and resources you invest in actually building and promoting the site.
Remember that you can use a Web Services Agency like Walking Dolphins to handle most of the “getting going” jobs on your behalf. But it is useful to understand the various factors. Note: Unless otherwise stated all of our comparisons are based on the features offered with the lowest regular price account. We disregard promotions that offer time-limited pricing, or free introductory offers.
A pre-note on the catches on price: Be aware of the conditions that are put on any pricing plan. For example, the best price package with Unlimited Everything, is offered by Lunarpages Web Hosting in its Personal Web Site package. But the lowest price comes with a 5 year prepayment. The best prices offered by ServerFly involve a 2 year prepayment and 1and1 requires all plans to be paid a minimum of quarterly. ServerFly also charges a setup fee for accounts that do not have a pre-paid commitment.
Note that a long-term prepayment can be exactly what you want if you know the company is reputable and offers all the features you will need. A longer prepayment is beneficial because it actually protects you against price increases as well as putting you into a “best customer” category that always matters despite what any company may say. It it’s a good business, they want to take care of their long term customers.
What you don’t know might hurt you
Different hosting companies offer a wide range of different “features” and they can use a confusing array of similar-sounding names to refer to quite different things. 1and1 calls their regular account the 1&1 Home account but offers a “Beginner” account with more restrictions for a dollar a month lower fee. Serverfly’s lowest price account is the “Budget Web Hosting Freedom” and LunarPages is called the “Starter.” LunarPages comes out on top in terms of price and features in any apples-to-apples comparison. The specific features and comparisons can be seen in the reviews on each in the Web Hosts section of the Secure Surfing Organization web site.
Before setting out some direct examples, let’s consider the major factors and features that make up some or all of a hosting package.
Reputation & Reliability
A host is worthless if you and your users (eg. family, customers, suppliers) cannot get on to your web site or experience frequent disruptions and long delays. Some companies have taken customer money and essentially run away with it, leaving the customer with nothing. Be very careful. What you see may not be what you get: Some companies will post logos intended to provide assurance to the customer but the logos are false. For example, as of August 8, 2009, a company called ServerPronto still prominently displayed the Better Business Bureau seal stating it is “registered” with the BBB. But a check at the BBB of Southeast Florida and the Caribbean shows that not only is the company not registered, it is recorded as having such a high problem rate that its official BBB rating is F, Failure.
In other cases, unsuspecting customers have signed up with a hosting firm only to learn later that in the process they transferred ownership of their domain name to the hosting company. This one of the reasons why The Secure Surfing Organizations recommends that you do not register your domain name with the same company that you choose to host your web site. While it adds a bit of inconvenience, you can use an intermediate service to do it for you or follow the instructions provided throughout this site on how to do it yourself. It is an inconvenience worth experiencing compared to the real problems you could face otherwise.
Even otherwise reputable hosting firms can and too frequently do make it very difficult for a customer to move either to a different provider or to your own internal servers. They will leverage your domain name registrations by increasing the complexity of your move and in some of the worst cases make it impossible for you to retrieve the contents of your web site.
Another tactic to be aware of is the practice of persuading customers to sign up at a very attractive rate and then socking them with price increases once they are firmly established. The con basically works by forcing you into the position of deciding to pay an extra few dollars every month or go through real hassles and a lot of time to change hosts.
Some sites specialize if getting customers to sign up for a “free” account with enough time, some as long as a year, that you will have built a site you care about and into which have invested significant time and resources. Thus when the free period is over, you are pretty much married to whatever terms the company wants to set.
Check the Hosts section of the Secure Surfing Organization to see a selection of hosting providers and read the reviews. From that you can choose one that meets your needs and your budget.
But always remember, the most significant cost in having your own web site is not the money to pay to register your domain name or the hosting fees you pay. It is the time and resources you invest in actually building and promoting the site. Make sure that no one can turn your real investment into a tool to manipulate you.
“Unlimited Drive Space”
You’ve probably already discovered the fact that the English word “unlimited” no longer means “unlimited” to many English-speaking companies. For example, you will find there are companies that offer unlimited drive space but learn later that it does not apply to space consumed by a database. If your web site operates from a database, there can be and often are specific caps on the size of that database.
Why should you care about drive space limits?
In most cases, you really do not need to be concerned about the issue. But, as a practical matter knowing that you have unlimited drive space means it is one more thing you do not have to worry about. If you decide you want to use your web site to back up important files and data, you do not need to double check everything to confirm that your host is not going to be on your case about disk usage.
There are so many reputable competitors that offer unlimited drive space, that you should simply not bother with any service that bothers to list such limits.
Of the firms with which we have direct experience, Lunarpages Web Hosting and Serverfly offer true unlimited drive space with their highest charge accounts while 1and1 even limits their highest priced account (Note that LunarPages offers unlimited drive space on its “personal” account currently at $4.95/mnth). 1and1 has clear drive space limitations for everyone and that is one of several reasons that we do not recommend signing up with 1and1 if you wish to maintain your flexibility.
What’s this about databases?
If you are using almost any blogging tool like WordPress or CMS platform like Joomla, you are using a MySql database. If you are hand-coding a web site using tools such as CoffeeCup or NetObjects Fusion, you can do so without any database.
How a provider treats databases will usually be critical to your ability to grow and, most importantly, your ability to move to a different provider or start hosting your site internally.
First, some reputable providers continue to impose limits on both the number of databases you can have and the size of any one of those databases.
LunarPages offers unlimited MySQL databases with its regular “Personal Web Site” package (currently $4.95/month). The Starter package on LunarPages includes 1 MySQL database, as does the Budget Web Hosting on ServerFly. The 1and1 Starter package includes 10 MySQL databases with a 100 mb size limit.
Unlimited can be pretty limiting if the MySQL database does not have the necessary functions enabled for you to make full use of what you think you are buying. Servers, the systems that actually operate the software such as PHP and MySQL, have configuration settings that can be turned on or off by the provider. An important example is the passthru() function. Many important tools need this function to be turned on to do their work. Both LunarPages and 1and1 are able to turn this function on without compromising the security of the system. ServerFly either is not capable of maintaining security while enabling passthru() or simply refuses to do so.
How can such things affect you? If you have decided to go it alone on a do-it-yourself path, you can be faced with things that won’t work, that produce cryptic error messages or even that break your entire web site, and you will not know why. Many have spent countless hours re-doing their work, trying to trouble shoot, scanning the web for help, eventually to discover that the problem has nothing to do with what they have done, but is traced to a disabled configuration on the host.
The reason we use the passthru() example here is that the Secure Surfing Organization has direct negative experience with its ServerFly account for precisely that reason. You may know that we were forced to change hosts when our news library threatened to approach the 100 mb limit set by 1and1. We proceeded with a tool called WP-DBmanager, which allowed us to back up all of the news items easily on our 1and1 hosted account. We then tried to install WP-DBManager on our ServerFly hosted account. Our techs played at it for a week but finally reported that the tool could not be installed on ServerFly because they would not enable the passthru() function.
We checked out our LunarPages hosted account and it worked perfectly well.
Of course there are other ways to approach the problem and undoubtedly ServerFly support would have provided assistance in making the move. However, we always try to accomplish our tasks the same way a regular user who is not endowed with technical training. The entire point of tools like WP-DBManager is that they allow people without extensive training to accomplish such tasks.
Bring in the Bandwidth!
Bandwidth considerations matter if you think you will have a lot of traffic. For most home users, this is not a real consideration. For small businesses, it could be and it is worth doing business with a host that takes the worry out of the equation by giving you unlimited bandwidth. What it is about is the number of people that will be accessing your web site at the same time. Also related to this is the quality of the network interface being provided by the host. Many simply do not mention this function, so you may have to ask. You should not be hosted by any provider that is not using a 100 Mb interface. When you hear about gigabit networks, they are in reference to home and business local area networks and not in reference to the internet (at least not for some while into the future!). But there are still providers who only use a 10 Mb connection.
This affects the speed of your site more than the bandwidth regardless the number of users visiting the site.
Included E-mail Accounts
Almost every provider offers a number of included e-mail accounts with the hosting plans. You need at least enough accounts to have one for each member of your family. If you are a business, you want enough for all employees, departments and potentially your own customers. We like the LunarPages and ServerFly options as they inexpensively allow for unlimited e-mail accounts (i.e. included in the basic packages).
[article to be continued]
Last Updated: August 08, 2009
