Choosing a Website Hosting Service
If you decide to go with a hosting service, find a stable, cost-effective, customer-friendly provider. Here are some questions to guide your decision:
How fast and reliable is the connection to the Internet? Do they guarantee 24-hour a day service and support? Do they have uninterrupted power supplies and robust backup systems?
Nothing is worse than spending thousands of dollars to develop a site, then hearing complaints from customers about slowness or server outages. Your hosting service should have at least two high speed connections (T1 or T3) to the Internet. In these days of power shortages, having backup generators is a must.
How long have they been in business?
When it comes to your business, you need an operation that has professional programmers, network specialists and offers responsive customer service.
Do they offer full domain name service (i.e.www.myname.com)?
Some hosting services do not want to go through the trouble of creating the full pathname aliases required to support different domain names. Instead of offering you the option of a www.myname.com domain name, they will offer you something that looks like this: www.lazyhosting.com/myname. This type of URL looks unprofessional, and is usually too long and cumbersome to fit on busines
cards and marketing materials. (It's also difficult to remember.) If the ISP doesn't offer full domain name service, look elsewhere.
How many megabytes of data storage are you allowed?
Look for a provider who offers at least 10 MB of space. Larger sites may require considerably more storage, especially if your site has multimedia content. Most providers charge extra for bandwidth that exceeds a certain threshold. Find out how much data transfer your plan allows each month and what it costs when you exceed the limit.
What kind of traffic log reports does the hosting service provide?
You should receive detailed traffic reports about visits to the site. There is a wealth of data in those files that can help you fine-tune your site to the needs and wishes of your readers.
How will you update your pages? Do you have FTP access?
The most common way to update pages is to edit them on your computer and upload the files to the web server with an FTP program.
Does the hosting service support CGI so you can use forms, database searches and image maps?
If you want to have forms or image maps on your site you will need to have full access to a cgi-bin directory (the directory where CGI scripts and other executable programs are stored). Most large hosting services offer this.
What are the provisions for security and keeping hackers at bay?
First, keep in mind that your provider is just as concerned about security as you are. The entire business depends on happy customers. Customers will most assuredly not be happy if their data is not secure. Perfect, absolute, and unbreakable security does not currently exist on the Internet. However, you can minimize your risks if you know what to look for in a hosting service. The first question to ask is whether it employs a security expert. If you have special security concerns, ask to speak with this person. If they don't, and this is a big requirement for you, find another provider.
What you want to hear is that they monitor activity on the site 24 hours a day so as to spot suspicious activity before it can cause damage, and they have a program for proactively installing and using state of the art firewalls or other methods of addressing known security problems.
The Computer Security Resource Center has a comprehensive website with general information about Internet security.
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