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Unbiased Step-by-step Guide on Web-Hosting

By Pavel Lenshin

No more speeches about importance of your own domain, no more talks about necessity of having paid hosting. If you think your brand domain name and stable hosting with a number of features and absence of ads are not worth, at least, $50-$150 per year, then you probably want to play games, rather than build online business.

Choosing hosting provider is something similar to choosing the place of your off-line office. Despite the fact that it is as easy to enter the URL and go to web-site that is physically located in Sidney as in Oslo, the final role here plays the speed of connection and stability of the hosting itself.

The problem with hosting comes down to the old statute of running ebusiness - that is RESEARCH before ACT! The easiest thing to do online is to pay money, the hardest is to THINK OVER what I'm paying for! That statement is true with hosting also because you can pay, let's say, $35 monthly for some particular hosting service, without notice that in two mouse clicks there is an hosting offer providing two times better services all for $15 per month only, so you will keep on losing services as well as $20 monthly that accumulates up to $240 annually losses as a Fee for not doing hosting research! Besides you should keep your eyes open for very good discounted offers that could save you 30-50% for the first year of payments.

Phase I - Determining NEEDS

1. Estimate your ebusiness basic requirements: total web-space needed, monthly bandwidth (approximate traffic volume multiplied by the most visited web-pages' total size) and ability to run CGI scripts as a must for every ebusiness.

If it is content rich web-site and example of your first year of hosting may look like this:

• 30-50Mb of disc space
• 500Mb-1Gb of monthly bandwidth
• cgi-bin to be able to run your own scripts an offer additional services

If it is sales web-site, your first year of hosting should be something similar to these requirements:

• 50-300Mb of disc space depending on how much info products you are going to sell and therefore upload on your server
• 1-3Gb of monthly bandwidth
• cgi-bin to be able to run your own scripts an offer additional services

In particular case with one-two ebooks and three-four pages sales web-site, 10Mb of storage space with 500Mb of monthly bandwidth, in general, is more than enough, if you are not going to expand it, so look closely and examine your potential but remember: you ALWAYS have a chance to expand, but you will NOT be able to get your money back if you overpay for services or web-space you don't need. That is called efficient ebusiness running.

2. Determine additional services that are necessary or preferably to have. Consider among them the following:

• Email aliases
• URL Redirects
• Web Mail
• FTP access/FTP Accounts
• Web control panel
• Graphic statistics
• Custom error pages
• POP3 Accounts
• Sub-domains
• Autoresponders
• Mailing List(s)
• Password protected directories
• MYSQL database(s)
• Perl
• - PHP
• SSI
and
• marketing info and support
• promotional help (SE submissions, free banner impressions)
• shopping cart
• chat
• forum