How to choose website hosting

How do you pick the best web host when there are thousands of hosting companies available online? It’s like going through the yellow pages trying to find burger restaurants. There are lots of them. Hopefully these tips will steer you in the right direction.

Uptime

First of all your website must be running 24/7. If the server is constantly going down your users will veer away. Every hosting provider aims at 99.9% uptime but not all reach it. For a comparison - some studies suggest that having more than 5 minutes downtime a year is too much. However such values are very difficult to achieve.

Location

Always choose the server as close as possible to your clients! Don't host an US restaurant website in Russia. This will increase the time it takes to load up the pages and will drive users away. Also note that Internet Service Providers usually offer higher speed connections to local servers.

Disk space

If you don't plan to host multimedia content or a huge library of images or something like that - usually all you need is a few megabytes of space. Most websites easily fit in the smallest hosting packages. However if you plan on serving videos or you are looking to host huge photos gallery - then you need to measure the required space and look for double that size of available disk space.

It is always recommended to look into services like Amazon S3 for serving certain static content (e.g. avatars in a forum). That would decrease your disk space requirements (as well as bandwidth - read further).

Sometimes hosting companies include the database in the disk space. If you are using a hosted visits statistics solution, then your database can easily grow to few gigabytes and you may run out of disk space.

Bandwidth

With today’s changing trends in web hosting services, it is important to get as much server space and bandwidth as you can. This will allow for necessary updates and increased traffic to your site as it becomes more popular.

Sometimes hosting providers offer 10mbps, 100mbps and 1000mbps lines. Which one to choose is a matter of how many users you will serve pages to simultaneously. Let's assume a page at average requires 10 requests to download 200Kb of data. Ignoring the fact that browsers don't run these 10 requests at the same time this figures mean that each user will require about 2mbps of your line. So you can serve content to as much as 5 users at the same time and they will still load the pages with reasonable speed. So that line will be enough to sustain more than 1,000,000 pages opened a day or, assuming your visitors open about 5 pages per visit, approximately 200,000 visits daily.

These figures look imaginary but there is a catch. In such scenario it won't be the line that will limit the speed but the server processing power. However a reasonable server with 10mbps line is good enough for blogs, business websites, online stores and etc. If, however, you want to serve large multimedia files (audio, images, video) you will definitely need higher speeds. And you might want to look into CDN providers to balance the load off a single server.

Bandwidth is usually metered - 500GB, 1000GB, etc. Again the rule is - if you don't have large images, video, audio - go for smaller options. If we use the example from above a website with 5000 visits per month, each visit about 5 pages, each page about 200Kb - that is about 5GB of bandwidth per month.

Type of hosting

There are generally three types of hosting options - shared hosting, virtual private server and dedicated server. With shared hosting your website resides along with other people's websites on a cluster server. You have access to your own folder, no console access or fancy features. However this is perfect for most people because usually it is quite cheap and meets the requirements of average business websites, online stores, etc.

If you are selecting a shared hosting option always consult with the developers who are managing/developing your website. Shared hosting usually runs management software like CPanel which can really make life easier but can also make it hell. There are scenarios in which your website may be incompatible with the management software so make sure to check that out before purchasing.

With VPS (virtual private server) you have a virtual server running on a cluster server. Quite good solution because you have full control of your virtual machine (full console access and etc) but you don't get all the CPU power for yourself. For websites with certain special needs (e.g. some software you need to install) this is a recommended option.

Dedicated servers are the best, but most expensive option. You have your own rented machine in the data center which you can manage and use as you please. This is an enterprise solution which should be considered if you are hosting many websites and you require some special software you want to install and manage.

Alongside the dedicated servers there is the co-location option too. Same thing but you actually own your server and you just pay for the space in the rack and the bandwidth.

Price

As a rule of thumb -  don't choose the cheapest option. It usually turns out to be a mess. There are shared hosting options for like $10/month which do the work pretty well. Something as low as $1/month probably doesn't.

Wrap up

There are many service providers to choose from. Do your homework, consult with your website developers, think about your users and you will make the right choice!