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Web Hosting Terminology

One of the things I wanted to accomplish in creating this blog is to help people figure out the way around a lot of the potholes in selecting a web hosting service. One of them is blackholing of some shared hosting providers. I will be writing a lot more on the subject of how to choose the a web hosting service in this blog.

Here is a list of some important web hosting terminology, and I will provide further updates in the future:

1. Shared Hosting: This refers to sharing a server with a number of other customers of a web hosting company. They will locate a number of their customer accounts on a single server. This can result in hundreds of websites being hosted on a single server. If some of them are particularly busy this can result in performance degredation for the remaining sites. This is one of the major drawbacks of shared hosting. Another drawback is less flexibility because there may be some limitations on the programs you can run because the server's resources must be shared. Of course shared hosting is less expensive - a major advantage.

2. Virtual Hosting - see Shared Hosting

3. Dedicated Hosting - The hosting company supplies the server and all equipment, and some software. However, the server is not shared with any other customers, so the customer has complete control over the bandwidth usage.

4. Co-Location Hosting - The customer buys equipment, including the server box, and then supplies it to the hosting company. The hosting company provides the backbone resources, plugging the server into its network, power supply and Intenet pipe. The host manages the infrastructure and the customer the rest. A hosting company also can offer management contracts to its co-location customers as add-ons.

5. Blackholing: Often hosting companies develop a bad reputation as being sources of spammers or excessive resources. As a result, their IP addresses may become banned or otherwise marked by some users, such as by enterprises or by search engines. One result is that e-mail from the IP addresses is blocked automatically. It is difficult to determine if a hosting company has been blackholed, but you should ask before signing up.

Choosing The Best Web Hosting

Here are a few factors to consider in choosing the best Web Hosting provider for your web sites. The most important will surprise you. We are not going regurgitate (uh cogitate) factors of declining importance like bandwidth or disk space. And remember bigger is not always the best! Here’s why:

Most Important Factors in Selecting Web Hosting Providers

Control Panel – This is the page you will see over and over as you modify, monitor and otherwise operate your websites. It should be easy to access and use. Make sure you can look at screen prints of the hosting provider’s control panel before signing up to make sure you are comfortable with it. We like cPanel Control Panel’s ease of use and clean arrangement, but there are other alternatives.

Customer Support - Yes you want this. Some hosting service providers are better at customer support, and we believe good customer support is extremely important. Some of the fastest growing web hosting providers have gained reputations for good customer support and some of the declining providers have customer support complaints. How do you figure out which hosting provider has good customer support? Well keep checking back here and we will tell you in our reviews as we roll them out!! Oh, 24/7 support has become the industry standard.

Fantastico or an equivalent: Helps a lot with loading programs or scripts.

Other Factors

Disk Space - How much disk space do you need for your site. If you are not hosting videos, 5-10 GB normally is more than enough. Most web hosting providers we have surveyed provide way more than this now, so disk space is a factor of declining importance - unless you have a huge website. If you grow huge, paying a few extra bucks/month won’t be a problem!

Bandwidth / month - This is another factor of declining importance. Again, the bandwidth provided is skyrocketing. If anything, you may want to consider ultra-high offerings, like over 500GB/month, as a negative if you want shared hosting. This is because it is likely that offering such high bandwidth can diminish server performance on a shared server.

Uptime - A very important factor. However, there are no reliable statistics on server uptime. So look for your web hosting provider to at least guarantee the standard 99% uptime, but in reality that is meaningless since it is practically impossible to enforce.

CGI Bin - Another declining factor since it has become a standard offering. This allows you to run your own scripts and programs. So, if your hosting service does not offer this, make sure you know what you are doing.

FTP Access - Always go with a provider who provides unlimited access, another industry standard.

Bandwidth Size - How Important Is It in Choosing a Hosting Provider?

As I begin rolling out my site reviews, you will find that I will not place much if any emphasis on the disk space provided or the bandwidth/month provided by the hosting service. Why? The amounts have become so high that for most webmasters, these numbers really are not too significant any longer. If a website becomes so popular that bandwidth is becoming an issue, congratulations, you have a hit!

These days bandwidth is CHEAP. So web hosting companies are providing more bandwidth than most people ever will need for their websites. So, if you are starting out, do not put much weight on the amount of bandwidth provided. If you already have sites, you know exactly what you need.

Another thing to consider with shared hosting, is that if you start using up too much bandwidth, or CPU, you should be moving over to dedicated hosting. Some shared hosting providers will suspend your site or insist you move to dedicated hosting when you become that large anyway.