Hi! I'm a drawing of Catherine. She does most of the writing here, including this blurb. (Does this count as writing in the third person?) Catherine believes that websites don't really run on technology, they run on emotions. If you agree, then she wants to help you rock it out and be awesome online.
To have a website, you need a web server somewhere to host it. (Not sure how that works? You might find Part 1 of How Websites Work helpful.) Web hosting has become very commoditised over the last few years, and there are a lot of hosting companies that provide essentially the same service. There are a kew differentiators to look out for.
Your web hosting company must have
- Reliability: Any bozo with a server can set themselves up as a web hosting company… in fact, I heard of a dude working tech support at a university who was running a web hosting company from the server hidden under his desk. This may, of course, be an urban legend, but it’s close to the truth. Make sure the company existed more than a month ago and shows no signs of folding their tents and running off with your data.
- Backups: All of your website data is stored on a hard drive of the web server, and hard drives sometimes get corrupted or just die. The more copies you have of that data the safer you will be, especially if they’re in unrelated locations. If both you and the web hosting company have backups, either can suffer a problem (your computer gets fried by a lightning surge, the web host’s data centre floods) and you’ll still have your data and be able to get back online quickly.
- Uptime: The most common lie told by webhosts is about uptime, which is how often the web server is able to transmit data. Many, many webhosts claim a 100% uptime, which is flat out impossible for low-end hosts. (The crazy-expensive ones can almost do it by having the server, the storage, the network, the power and the monitoring completely redundant by running two of everything. This is why they’re crazy-expensive.) In reality, every server needs downtime for scheduled maintenance, usually a couple of hours per month. And outages do happen. Web servers are expensive and well-designed computers, but any device running for 24/7 under load will have occasional failures (even windmills need maintenance), and in the average setup there are about seven devices that your website depends upon. Under the circumstances, 99.99% uptime (about 4 minutes of outage per month) is damn impressive, and good enough for most businesses.
- Technical support: This is a big one. Responsive, skilled and helpful technical support make all the difference in your Technology Frustration Levels. Sign up for a trial account and send in a few customer support requests. If they’re not adequately handled, the trial never becomes a paid version.
- Resource sharing: With $10/month hosting, you’re not the only customer on a server. The server resources are sliced up into customer pools (don’t worry, these pools aren’t linked; other users don’t have access to your data), and each customer competes for the processing, network and data resources it needs. On well-managed servers, this is handled with few problems and every website has enough resources to run efficiently. On over-provisioned servers, your website can run very slowly as there simply aren’t enough resources to go around. Always feel free to ask a hosting provider how they manage resource sharing on a shared web server.
Desirable features of a web hosting company
- Fantastico one-click installs: Fantastico is a web application that lets you install other applications very, very easily. You can have WordPress up and running by clicking one button and entering a password. Whether you’re a tech deity or a complete beginner, this feature is so handy that I married it and took it home to meet the folks and we’re very happy together. That’s right, it’s so useful it makes me do silly analogies.
- Free MySQL databases: If you want a shopping cart, a CMS (like WordPress), a forum or a number of other popular web applications, you’ll need a database. The database is an immensely complicated spreadsheet that contains all the data that the application uses. Since you may need anywhere up to six of these, it’s best if they’re free.
- Email hosting: If you want email for your website (and you almost certainly do), there are too many options on what flavour would suit you for me to go into right now. I’ll talk about this in a later post.
- Multiple domains: Some web hosts only let you host one website per account. It’s better if you can host a few, especially if you want the luxury to make mistakes!
Cheap web hosting companies that 90% of people recommend
Expensive web hosting companies that 90% of people recommend
Who we use
DreamHost Web Hosting
$8.95 – $10.95 per month
Rating: AWESOME
Reliability: 10 out of 10. In fact, they’re 10 years old this year.
Backups: Regularly. As a bonus, they have Subversion which allows you to version your website so if next week you regret your changes you can roll back to a previous version. If you’re not technical, just know that this is WONDERFUL.
Uptime: Listed as 100% (which as previously mentioned is bollocks), but that’s used to refund money if they don’t make the uptimes. For every hour that the critical systems are down you’re refunded a day’s fee.
Technical support: Prompt and helpful, I’ve had no problems.
Resource sharing: DreamHost has been reported as occasionally being quite bad at this, especially for busier websites. We’ve chosen to try out their new Virtual Private Server, which is more expensive but doesn’t share resources and shouldn’t have the same problem. We’ll let you know how that works. [Six months later update: it works great. We host a half-dozen websites on that server with very rare downtime.]
Fantastico: Yes. To quote Scarlet O’Hara: “I will never do a manual install again!”
Free MySQL databases: Yes, unlimited. This could be inadequate for very busy websites, again we’ll keep you updated.
Email hosting: Yes, you can host your email directly through Gmail or their mail servers.
Multiple domains: Unlimited. From a practical perspective you probably don’t want more than half a dozen.
Also, they’re funny.
Special bonus offer!
I’ve tried a few web hosting companies and read a lot of reviews and I’m confident that DreamHost is one of the best in the $10/month category. As a nice bonus for our readers, if you sign up for DreamHost webhosting using the code “BEAWESOME” then you’ll receive a free domain name registration (saves you $15). Sweet! Even sweeter, this offer never expires, so feel free to take your time and look around before making a decision.
Did this help, or is it still as clear as mud? Leave a comment if you want more information!
If I’m asking a hosting provider how they manage resource sharing on a shared web server, what should I be looking out for in their answer?
I am not a technical person, and don’t want to look really stupid if I don’t understand what they’re talking about.
=)
Oh, that’s a fantastic question! And I’ve realised I don’t have a good answer.
There are signs that a server is overprovisioned: memory ballooning, CPUs maxed out for extended periods, network usage at bandwidth capacity…
… but the hosting providers are really unlikely to answer questions about that sort of thing. I know we wouldn’t.
All you can really do is mention that you’ve heard some hosting companies put too many customers on a server and pause dramatically, giving them a chance to incriminate themselves?
Catherine
Oh, look at this post! Right after I emailed you, too.
B/c I'm *really* good at newbie questions, here's mine: geography matters to some extent, right? Like, you'd want your web hosting company to be perhaps not local but within your country/chunk of the country at least, right?
You are EXCELLENT at questions and that's a good one!
It matters, sort of. Most of the time, the difference between data travelling from another continent is milliseconds, especially if you're using broadband. If the majority of your users are on slow dial-up, it might matter a few seconds, but probably not more.
Support matters, if you need phone support and they only offer it in their business hours… I don't fancy the idea of getting up at 3am to make an international call ($$$!) for tech support!
All that being said, our webhost is in the US and we're in Australia. We expected that a large number of our customers would be northern US, so that was fine, and I prefer to log support tickets rather than call anyway.
The only problem we've had is an hour's outage when the big link between Australia and the US was down.