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
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