Things You Must Know Before You Look for a Web Host
Tags: Budget Hosting, CPanel, Customer Support, Premium Hosting, Shared Hosting, Web Hosting, Web Space
We often find ourselves struggling to decide between web hosting companies before we actually finalize a webhost to host our website. The task is always painful unless you are very clear about all of your hosting requirements. To help you ease the task of looking up and finalizing a web host, here is a list of crucial factors that you must first think upon, determine the actual requirement and then dig in further.
- Hosting Budget - The very first thing you must do is to set a budget for hosting your site. Start by considering the purpose of your website, the returns you expect (ROI) and the maximum amount you can pay to any hosting company to get your site hosted. This factor alone can eliminate most of the companies from your list and help you proceed further with other decision making things. Some other points you should keep in mind are the additional charges that you might incur to procure any software required to run your site, its development charges etc,.
- Windows or Unix - The next factor on our task list is the operating system. There is a lot of difference between hosting a site on a Windows and Linux based server. If you intend to use Apache, PHP and MySQL based environment for your site, Linux would be a better choice and since you are the owner of the site, you must have a clear picture about it. If your choice is Linux, which flavor of Linux you prefer? If you are unsure, look at the functionality of your site, its features and the development environment in which it was developed. This should help you decide the OS for hosting your site.
- Server Resources - How much processing power your website will need? If your site has static content and few PHP pages, you will not need lot of server resources but if you want to host a forum, photo album, blog or any other application that involves lot of PHP processing, many database connections then you should think of hosting your site on something better than a shared hosting account. Sometimes, even if you are hosting resource intensive applications, a shared hosting account can still suffice your requirement and that’s because of very less number of users connecting to your site. So, you must also think about the number of users you expect to visit your website and take a decision accordingly.
- Web Space - How much webspace do you require to host your site? Before you arrive at a number, also include the space required by database, space required for number of email accounts you will have, if you plan to store the log files on server, images/files that you will upload, any additional software you may upload etc.
- Bandwidth - If you had previously hosted your site, you might have an idea about this. Otherwise, determining the bandwidth you might require is not a very difficult task. Consider, the number of users accessing your site, amount of data transferred on each request, uploads/downloads etc., to arrive at an estimate. Photo album sites, blogs, forums require higher bandwidth than static websites and sometimes exceeds your projections.
- Control Panel - Many users are very comfortable using CPanel but not everyone prefers CPanel control panel. If you don’t have any such preference, you may skip this point but consider it as an important factor if you want to stick to CPanel control panel or any other panel in specific.
- Customer Support - What kind of support do you prefer? You always want to contact the support by phone rather than emailing them? Not every company offers technical support over phone, so you must decide the mode of support that you want in advance.
Those were the primary factors that you must consider, now let’s look at the smaller factors that you may or may not want to consider in your decision making.
- The database, could be MySQL or something else.
- cgi access, if required.
- Number of domains in one account, sub domains, add-on or parked domains.
- Number of email accounts, auto-responders and email aliases.
I hope, this post eases up your task to a great extent and helps you find the right host to get your site hosted. Good luck! 
