Web Design and Web Hosting

Hosting is a very competitive industry and when it comes down to it, most hosts are very similar in a lot of ways. That can make shopping around for a host difficult because it’s hard to tell one host from the next. Today we’ll look at what hosts have in common:

Most hosts offer unlimited, or essentially unlimited, resources: If disk space offered is 10GB or “unlimited”, it basically the same thing for most sites.

Most hosts want you to pay for a year up front: There are a few exceptions, but usually you either have to pay up front or you get a big discount for doing so.

Most hosts offer 24/7 customer service: Again there are exceptions, but a good host should have live support available every hour of every day.

As you read through our host reviews, you’ll notice a trend. Pretty much all of them offer more disk space, email accounts, and bandwidth than you’ll ever need. Why is that? Most of it is just a marketing gimmick. They know people won’t use all those resources and they are just playing a numbers game. Shared hosting is all about packing as many customers as you can onto a server to spread the costs and increase revenues through high volume. A certain percentage of customers will sign up and never even put up their site, a large percentage put up a small basic site that never really grows, and only a very small number of customers end up using even a fraction of the resources allotted for them.

Hosting is an ultra-competitive industry. It has a fairly low barrier to entry, and once a host is established the incremental cost of adding one more customer is essentially $0. Adding one customer doesn’t require another server, or a new hard drive, or any extra equipment or costs. Adding another thousand customers might, but adding one is basically free for the host. That means you have hundreds of hosts competing for revenue from a pool of customers that have a pretty decent profit margin.

Choosing a good web host is very important for your site. Here are a few key reasons:

1. Your site needs to be reliable, accessible, and fast. You website will only get repeat visitors if the people who go to your site are always able to pull it up quickly. If your site goes up and down or takes a long time to load, you’ll begin losing visitors.

2. You files need to be safe in case of a disaster. It’s important for hosts to keep regular backups of their servers and to keep those backups stored off-site. If there is a disaster of some sort and the servers are lost and the host does not have backups, or they do have backups but they are stored in the same location as the servers and area also destroyed, then your site could be gone with no way to recover it. You should also back up your website files on your own, but that isn’t always practical or even possible.

When you need to make a page or pages of your site secure, for collecting sensitive information such as credit card numbers, you’ll need an SSL certificate. Some hosts include a free shared certificate you can use, or you can purchase your own SSL certificate.

As far as the actual level of security is concerned, both are usually the same. As long as the shared certificate is of the same encryption level as the one you’d buy (which they usually are), then the information is just as safe with a shared certificate as it would be with a dedicated certificate.

The main difference between the two is that with a shared certificate your URL would change to a sub-directory of the certificate holder for those pages, so your URL might look like this:
https://secureserververexample.com/yourdomainexample.com/checkout

With your own secure certificate your secure URL would be:
https://yourdomainexample.com/checkout

Another benefit to your own secure certificate is that people could like the lock in their browser to give them extra confidence that the site they are dealing with has gone through some extra verification process in order to get the secure certificate. That is not always the case, as there are some cheaper versions that don’t authenticate the buyer as well, but in general that is an extra benefit.

What makes a top host depends on your definition of a top host. When someone says a top host they could mean a popular host with a lot of customers, or a high quality host. Note that the two are not always the same.

Several of the hosts with the most customers have the most customers because they spend millions of dollars on advertising. At the other end of the spectrum you have some quality hosts that grow without much (if any) advertising but their quality leads to word of mouth marketing.

When we review hosts we do usually get a commission of some sort partly because just about any host has an affiliate program, so if we’re sending customers we might as well get a referral credit. But we don’t just review and push any host that gives us a commission. There are many hosts, including some of the best known names, that we don’t review because they don’t pass our basic quality standards. So when we say top host, we mean a host that we think you can count on, not just a host with a lot of customers or a big name.

Most hosts these days offer a low price to get you as a customer, then once you are signed up they try to sell you 30 additional services that are supposed to help your hosting account.

These extra services are often unnecessary and over priced. For example, one popular service is search engine submission. The problem is that submitting your site to search engines is free and it’s probably better to do it yourself.

Another big upgrade is whois privacy. This is something that you want to be careful with and you are probably better off doing this directly through a registrar rather than through a host. Some hosts are registrars, such as TierraNet, but others are a reseller for a registrar, like JustHost.

Basically, before you pay for upgrades through your host ask yourself if it is something you really need and if it is worth paying for. If it is, shop around a bit because some of these services don’t have to be done through your host.

Web hosting companies, just like any other business, sometimes go out of business. Your domain name SHOULD be protected because every domain is registered through an ICANN accredited registrar and ICANN has policies in place that will protect the domains and they will be transferred to another registrar.

Hosting companies have no such protection, however, so it is best to be prepared for you host going under. It is rare, but since they hold all your website files if they are suddenly gone and you don’t have your files backed up somewhere then you could be in a lot of trouble.

We recommend backing up your site every time you make a significant change or update and keeping a full copy of your website on your computer. That way, if your host should go out of business, you’ll just need to find a new host, change the DNS on your domain name, and upload your files.

Comparing one web host with another is not very simple if you really want to get down to the specifics. There are a lot of things that hosts do on the backend that people never see that have a big impact on how well their service operates. For example:

What kind of servers do they use? Just like you can buy a cheap, slow home computer, or a fast, quality computer, hosts have the same options when choosing servers. Sometimes to cut costs a host will go with a cheap version.

Who are their bandwidth providers? Not all bandwidth is created equal. Some providers have better networks with more hubs and faster speeds.

Where are they located? If the host is not near a major hub then they may be more easily cut off if a problem with a bandwidth provider arises.

Do they keep off site backups? If their datacenter was somehow destroyed (fire, earthquake, etc.) then having backups of your files off-site is key.

With customer service, do they answer their phones? Do the people answering know what they are talking about and are they empowered to actually help?

There are a lot of factors that separate one host from the next, so it’s important to test them out to see how they work. We will provide the information that we can as we review various hosts.

Once you choose a web host, what if they aren’t any good? What if they are down all the time or their customer service is horrible?

The good news is, it’s generally not impossible to change hosts. If you have your website files then you should be able to download them all using FTP and then just upload them to a new host using FTP. If you can upload your files to the new host before changing the DNS on your domain name, then you’ll be able to make the switch with 0 downtime. This will be much easier if your new host gives you a static IP address because you can use the IP to upload your files and make sure your site is working before redirecting the domain name.

The time it would not be easy to switch hosts is if you use some tool specific to that host. The most common problem would be if you use website building software provided by the host that requires that specific host in order to function. Often you will not be able to take those sites with you, in which case you could go to a new host and start building up your site from scratch.