What are some of the things you should look for when choosing a web host? The criteria for choosing a free web host and a commercial web hosting solution are slightly different although they do overlap. Since thesitewizard.com caters to people who might be looking for either of these types of hosting, I will deal with each of these in turn. If you are only interested in one of these types, you can simply skip to the appropriate section. I have written these sections to be as independent of the other as possible.

Choosing a Free Web Host

1. Advertising

   Most free web hosts impose advertising on your website. This is done to cover the costs of providing your site the free web space and associated services. Some hosts require you to place a banner on your pages, others display a window that pops up every time a page on your site loads, while still others impose an advertising frame on your site. There is really no hard and fast rule which is to be preferred: some people hate a pop-up window, other webmasters dislike having to stuff banner codes onto their pages, and many people cannot stand an advertising frame (which may cause problems when you submit your website to search engines). Whichever method is used, check that you’re comfortable with the method.

2. Amount of web space

   Does it have enough space for your needs? If you envisage that you will expand your site eventually, you might want to cater for future expansion. Most sites use less than 5MB of web space. Indeed, at one time, one of my other web sites, thefreecountry.com, used less than 5MB of space although it had about 150 pages on the site. Your needs will vary, depending on how many pictures your pages use, whether you need sound files, video clips, etc.

3. FTP access

   Some free hosting providers only allow you to design your page with their online builder. While this is useful for beginners, do you have the option to expand later when you become experienced and their online page builder does not have the facility you need? FTP access, or at the very least, the ability to upload your pages by email or browser, is needed. Personally, I feel FTP access is mandatory, except for the most trivial site.

4. File type and size limitations

   Watch out for these. Some free hosts impose a maximum size on each of the files you upload (including one with a low of 200KB). Other sites restrict the file types you can upload to HTML and GIF/JPG files. If your needs are different, eg, if you want to distribute your own programs on your pages, you will have to look elsewhere.

5. Reliability and speed of access

   This is extremely important. A site that is frequently down will lose a lot of visitors. If someone finds your site on the search engine, and he tries to access it but find that it is down, he’ll simply go down the list to find another site. Slow access is also very frustrating for visitors (and for you too, when you upload your site). How do you know if a host is reliable or fast? If you can’t get feedback from anyone, one way is to try it out yourself over a period of time, both during peak as well as non-peak hours. After all, it is free, so you can always experiment with it.

Here’s you need to always look within the hosting strategy :

Disk Area
Estimates your disk area, a single html page normally +- 150 KB, 25MB Disk Area = 166 pages.

Bandwidth/Information Transfer
How to quickly calculate bandwidth you need. Initial take size of all pages and pictures/multimedia in your web internet site. Let’s say it 50MB then how a lot of visitors to your internet website? Possibly you estimate it would be 10000 guests per month, then bandwidth you need to have for is 50 x 10000 = 500 000 MB = 500 GB Information Transfer/month. There’re a great deal of net hosting strategy with limitless bandwith package .

Domain Name
If you don’t have any domain name but for your internet site, you should see if net hosting package include domain name registration. Generally they incorporate it in their program. Typical price to register a domain name is amongst 8$ to 12$ per year.

E-mail Account
You need to have it as identity for your website, ex. you@yoursite.com, support@yoursite.com. You ought to see how a lot of e-mail accounts offered for your internet website. Extra characteristics on e-mail account is E-mail Forwarding, E-mail Autoresponders, E-mail Aliases.

Control Panel
If you don’t like FTP to upload your internet web sites, then you could upload it with manage panel upload menu. It’s easy and basic job to upload. Control panel is a net page to manage your hosting account, add e-mail accounts, see statistics of your net website and so on.

Database
Did you want database? If you are utilizing constructed-in script/CMS like mambo, joomla, PHPNuke, Forums like VBulletin, phpBB, or shopping cart, and so on. then you need database for your internet website. How a lot of database you require? for all scripts above typically you just want 1 database account. An additional consideration is how a lot of space is for your database. I discovered two type of database area provided by internet hosting business, very first they consist of it in your internet area (internet space = web space + database area) other is they specify area for your database.

Bandwidth
This is the size of the “pipe” that runs in between the client and the server, and along which all the information travels. The wider the pipe, the far more information can fit via it. The size of the pipe is usually measured in megabytes or gigabytes per month. You can now see wherever the term broadband comes from—it implies you have a big excess fat data pipe!

FTP
This is the approach utilized for transferring files from the client to the server and vice versa—it’s extremely beneficial for obtaining your internet internet site onto the server in the first location! FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol.

Domain Name
This is the “bubbleunder.com” aspect in the net deal with http://www.bubbleunder.com. You can buy the rights to use a domain name for a fixed period of time—usually 1 or two many years at a time (it is not yours to very own forever). This is referred to as registering the domain.

Hosting
Hosting refers to the storage of your internet website files on an World wide web-linked server somewhere. This hosting service is completely separate from the registering
of your domain name, even though numerous hosting businesses offer each services. Web site owners
use web hosts to retailer the files for their website so that the site owners themselves do not have to expose their very own individual computers’ challenging drives to potentially malicious internet surfers who request the net site’s pages above the Web. Oh, and it beats acquiring to make positive that their very own computer systems are continuously up and running for everyone to access!

Here is the Glossary of Web Hosting Terms. Simple but easy to understand. Collected from Various Resources.

Alias
A name that points to another name. Aliases are used to make the original name easier to remember or to protect the site’s identity.

Aliased Nameservers
An aliased nameserver is a nameserver that has been labeled as yours (the reseller’s) despite the fact it actually belongs to your Web hosting provider. This ensures that domains located on your server are listed as “ns.yourservername.com” instead of “ns.yourprovidersname.com”. Also see NAMESERVER below.

Apache
One of the world’s most popular Web server programs, Apache was built by a group of open-source programmers and is often used because of its outstanding performance, strong security features and the fact that it is free.

ASP
Active Server Pages. ASP is Microsoft’s server-side scripting technology. An Active Server Page has an .asp extension and it mixes HTML and scripting code that can be written in VBScript or JScript. ASP is distributed with Microsoft’s IIS web server, so most host using IIS will also offer ASP for dynamic web programming. ASP.NET is the next version of ASP. Other popular server-side scripting languages are Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, TCL, Python, and JSP.

Audio Streaming
The process of providing audio content on a web site. This takes up a large amount of bandwidth, especially if you get a lot of visitors at your site. Some hosts do not allow audio or video streaming because of this.

Auto Responder
An automated program that acknowledges receipt of an e-mail message, and then sends back a previously prepared email to the sender, letting them know it was received. Once you configure your autoresponder, it sends e-mail with no further action required on your part, making your web site interactive around the clock. Most hosting companies let you set this up through their control panel.

1st items you have to pick with web hosting program is net hosting operating method. It could confusing to pick which is the best. Here is checklist of internet hosting operating technique and details about the performance.

Linux
Linux, a version of UNIX, is a extremely versatile platform that serves a amount of functions properly. It is especially appropriate for meeting your Net specifications, this kind of as mailing, streaming, Net serving, and fileserving. Linux is a quite expense-effective selection it employs hardware efficiently, and permits for a lot more web sites per server, thereby lowering the cost of hosting per account. Linux servers are compatible with certain Microsoft extensions and applications, for instance, MS SQL (a database program) or Microsoft Front Page (a net authoring tool). Many engineers choose the flexibility, safety, and manage of Linux servers. Linux is Open Source (totally free) software program and a host of free applications are accessible to customers of Linux.

Microsoft Windows NT/2000
Window’s 2000 graphical user interface makes it user-friendly and supplies a familiar interface for most IT teams to function with. It integrates nicely with other Microsoft applications and there are a wealth of commercial applications offered for this platform. Specifically appealing is the integration with Microsoft Application Server (ASP) which allows the creation of dynamic net pages linked to SQL databases, and other Legacy back office techniques.