I last left off explaining some of the basic features of a standard web hosting plan. In this post I’m going to explain a few of the extras. I’m noticing that my posts are running a bit long so I’m going to start shortening them and actually breaking my posts down a bit more and rambling on less, which is tough to do considering that there is so much information that you need to know. With that said, here are a few extras that you should expect to see with most hosting plans.

1. Databases – Databases are a structured collection of records that can easily be recovered via queries. There are thousands of needs for a database such as forms that collect information, the products in your online shopping cart, blogs, etc. Basically any information that you need to store and retrieve via a programming language such as PHP or ASP. There are 3 main types of databases that you should be familiar with, MySQL, SQL and Coldfusion. In future posts I’ll cover these the difference in these databases. I personally find MySQL to be the easiest to manage & setup. This blog actually uses MySQL. I would say that 10 databases would be the minimum number that any web hosting plan should offer.

2. Free software – It’s difficult to actually find a web hosting company that doesn’t offer some of the basic free applications such as forums, blogs, forms & shopping carts such as osCommerce. These are applications that can easily be installed on your web hosting account via a few clicks and some information. You’ll find that a popular group of free applications is Fantastico, it will generally contain WordPress for blogs and osCommerce for online shopping carts. You’ll also find that Fantastico will offer some great scripts for Live Support, FAQs & Website builders. You can find a list of the free Fantastico scripts at http://www.netenberg.com/fantastico_scripts.php. Many companies will offer the complete list while others will only offer a select group of scripts. Be sure to take the time to find out the free scripts & applications that your web host offers before spending money on a propriety application.

That’s it, normally I would give a couple more features to look for but I’ll save that for my next post so that I don’t run too long. I realize that I have left certain items out but I’m trying to cut my posts down so please leave any comments with any questions or anything that I may have left out.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
CEO/Founder – www.WebsiteToad.com

I have one final post regarding web hosting and it’s based on the platform that you choose for setting up your web hosting. There are two basic platforms for web hosting: Windows & Linux. There is another platform or two but these are the two that you will see offered on majority of the web hosting websites that you search.

A common misconception is that you need to setup your website on a Windows server because you’re website is built on a computer that runs Windows. This isn’t true and you would base your server on the type of programming language that you use. The only real reason that you’d need to have a Windows machine would be if your site was using ASP or you needed a SQL database. These are proprietary to Microsoft so you’d need to use a Windows machine but other than that I personally see no reason for using a Windows server.

I manage quite a few websites and I only have one of them on a Windows server and that’s because it’s an online shopping cart based on ASP & SQL. Every other website that I manage is on a Linux machine so you by no means need to choose a Windows hosting plan.

Both of these servers will support your basic HTML files that make up your website. Again, mySQL is generally found on Linux machines and SQL is found on Windows machines but you could actually run mySQL on a Windows machine as well. Both have their security vulnerabilities but many people will argue that Windows servers have more vulnerabilities than Linux servers

The bottom line is that the differences aren’t that big between Windows Web Hosting & Linux Web Hosting so just be sure that you know which programming language that you plan on use such as PHP, ASP, if any. If you’re just starting out and you plan on building a website based on basic HTML, it won’t make a difference at all which you choose. I would simply select a web hosting company that offers the options that you’re looking for and go from there.

That’s all I’m really going to get into in regards to web hosting for now, I’m sure that I’ll revisit web hosting in the future but I just wanted to give you the basics for now. Next I think I’ll get into some of the basics in regards to writing HTML code. Be sure to comment or contact me with any questions that you may have.

I welcome any comments on some other differences that I haven’t included.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

I just wanted to leave one more quick post regarding web hosting. These are definitely a few things that you’ll want to look at when searching for a web hosting company.

1. Phone Support – Any major web hosting company is going to offer phone support and I wouldn’t host without it. Imagine your website goes down on a day when you have a press release coming out or some other major event where you expect a surge in website traffic. Now imagine that your website goes down and all you can do is send and email to support. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience and phone support is a necessity. Don’t even consider a web host unless they have a posted phone number on their website.

2. Uptime Guarantee – Most hosting companies will offer something like “99.9% Uptime Guarantee”. This is something to look for as well, 99.9% is very good and really no one can guarantee 100% uptime. I’m sure some companies will claim 100% uptime but just be sure that they offer something very close to 99% uptime.

3. Monthly Commitments – I don’t really recommend paying for a year or so upfront. If you sign-up with a hosting company and find out that it doesn’t meet your needs you’re really not out anything. Granted, most offer a 30 day money back guarantee but why have to mess with billing or customer support when you can simply pay month to month. Once you’ve had a chance to host your website for a couple months you may consider committing for a year so that you don’t have the month to month billing plus you’ll find that you generally will save money by prepaying for a year but I don’t suggest signing up for a full year right off the bat.

4. Setup Fees – Unless your getting into a dedicated machine or something that requires custom configuration I would never recommend signing up with a web hosting that requires a setup fee. There are too many reputable web hosting companies that don’t charge a setup fee.

5. 30 Day Money Back Guarantee – What is it going to hurt to be able to try out a web host and know that you can get your money back if you’re not satisfied with their service or support. Again, there are too many reputable companies out there that offer 30 day money back guarantees out there to not choose one.

That’s it for this post, I’m going to leave one more post regarding web hosting and we’ll get into design & the rest of the basics.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

Web hosting is like renting a storefront but instead of renting a brick & mortar store you are renting space on a web server. Once you’ve created the files that make up your website and pointed your domain names to your web hosting company you will publish the files to your web hosting account which makes it accessible to anyone who types in your domain name. One thing to point out is that your homepage will need to be named index.htm, index.html, default.asp, index.php among a few other options but never name your homepage something like hompage.htm or homepage.html or your site won’t be found properly. With that said, let’s get into some basic information regarding web hosting solutions.

1. Disk Space – This is the amount of space that you’ve ‘rented’. The amount of space that you need really depends on how much content you plan on publishing. The more pages, graphics, images, flash etc that you plan on publishing will require additional space. A decent amount of space for most websites is about 5GB. You’ll find some companies that offer some huge number like 1,000GB of space. Unless you plan on publishing a huge corporate site there really won’t be a need for that amount of space. That’s like buying a 500 horsepower car, yeah it’s nice to say but you’ll never need it.

2. Bandwidth / Data Transfer – This is the amount of data you are allowed to deliver from your site in a given month. Whenever someone visits your website data is transferred from your web hosting account to the monitor of the person visiting your website. This includes text, graphics, images, etc. The size of the images, the number of graphics, etc will determine the amount of data transfer so it’s always a good idea to use images that are lower resolution & limit the number of large size graphics on your website.

3. Email Accounts – This is going to be the number of personal email accounts are allowed to have in your web hosting plan. I would say that 5 email accounts would be a minimum for a new or personal website but these days most companies give you at least 100 so this won’t be an issue.

Email accounts within a hosting plan allow you to setup personal email accounts. For example, say you own TonysToys.com, you could setup sales@tonystoys.com, info@tonystoys.com, tony@tonystoys.com, etc. One last thing on email accounts, often times you’ll find that your email accounts are taken into account when determining disk space. For example, say you have 25mb of space left after you publish your website and you receive an email with a 1mb attachment via your email account, you would then only have 24mb left. Not every hosting company works this way but majority of them do.

4. Domains / Add-On Domains – This is a great option that really made it big with web hosting companies in the last couple of years. Add-On domains allows you to host more than 1 website on a single web hosting plan. This is a great way to save money because you don’t need to purchase a web hosting account for each domain name that you plan on building a website for. Just knowing that majority of my web sites are generally under a few GBs let’s me know that I can setup a few websites on any web hosting account that I setup that offers the capability of hosting multiple domains on 1 account.

That’s it for this post, in my next post I’m going to explain some of the additional features that you can expect with most web hosting plans such as databases, pre-installed software among other features.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com