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Webhosting Checklist

When buying webspace or hosting as an starting webmaster you don't know where to look at. In this article you can find a checklist that shows you how to determine what company has a good hosting offer for you.

1. Does the company have what you need?

For starting webmasters a simple website without any scripting languages is sufficient. But when you look further you will see that many hosting companies offer PHP, Perl and other languages within their packages. Our advise is take what ever you need, and what you expect that you need.

2. Diskspace

How many diskspace do you need? This is an important issue, however for a standard website you need no more than 25 Mb this is enough for about 400 pictures and dozens of documents. If you use a database you can even put more documents on your site with database driven templates.

3. Bandwidth

It is very important that you have enough bandwidth. Depending on your pages you can have 100's or even 1000's of visitors for 1 Gb in traffic, however paying for 50 Gb of bandwidth and not using 1 Gb is a waste of money. An important issue with bandwidth is that you know how much you should pay a Gigabyte if you use more bandwidth than included. And if you get any updates if that figure is about to be reached.

4. Speed

To make sure your visitors get to view your pages fast, you should make sure that your host is fast. You can determine this by visiting the webhosting company site, but usually they make sure their own page is pretty fast so that isn't a good measurement in many cases. Pinging the host isn't always a good tool. You can get a good idea of the server speed by visiting another site which is hosted on a server of the company, but you should figure out yourself which site that is.

5. Reliability

Is your web host reliable? This question is hard to answer but however you can find out. Just do a search on Google and search for your website hosting company, you can find out user comments on that host and if it is, or isn't, reliable and stable.

6. Customer support

This is primarily important for the beginning webmaster. Good customer support is essencial if you do this the first time. Lots of hosting companies have toll-free support, which can save you lots of time.

7. Location of your hosting provider

The location of your hosting provider can be very important. It doesn't bother if you have an international site, but imagine that you have a site that is mainly focused on German visitors. It would be unlogical to host your site in the US. This should make a difference if you got a certain geographic target area.

8. Extra features

Does the web host have any extra features? This can mean any of the following;
- Is there support for sub-domains/DNS management?
- Is there support for your own error 404 pages?
- Are there any e-mail accounts included?
- Do you have database support?
- Does the host have any pre-installed scripts available?

We hope that this helps you choosing the right hosting provider for your website!

Extracted from Web Tool Central.

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