Maxmillian*s Gold: The Right Hosting for Your Site

here are so many web hosts competing for your business. It can be completely overwhelming, and it would take you a month to check out every single web hosting company to determine which one would be best for you. If you aren’t a hosting expert, you’ll usually find the jargon so complex that you don’t even know what you need or don’t need. With hosting prices ranging from “free” to hundreds of dollars a month, it might seem impossible to determine which host plan is the best deal for you.

To clear some of the confusion, you should figure out the requirements for your specific site. Different sites have different needs. If your site is basically just for information and has less than twenty pages, you won’t need the same hosting plan as a complex shopping site, or a site that runs dozens of embedded programs.

MICROSOFT FRONTPAGE, HTML, PHP, ASP, DATABASES – HELP!

Some hosts are very limited on the type of programming language you can use. If you are new to creating web sites, you might find a program like Microsoft Frontpage much easier to use. It’s a WYSIWYG program, which simply means, “What you see is what you get.” The program allows you to make the pages like you would documents, and the program fills in the HTML to make the site appear like you set it up. You will need to make sure that your host offers “Frontpage extensions.” Some hosts charge more for this service, but you can (and should) usually get this included in the basic price.

All hosts support pure HTML, but you will probably need PHP or ASP capabilities. PHP somehow stands for “Hypertext Preprocessor,” and it is a scripting language used within HTML to create dynamic pages without having to use miles of HTML code. ASP stands for “Active Server Pages,” and they usually use ActiveX scripting. Both PHP and ASP are similar to and can do everything CGI scripts can do. PHP is usually preferred to CGI scripts because it is compatible with so many more databases. ASP is preferred to CGI by people who are more familiar with Visual Basic.

Whichever language you plan to use, you should make sure that your host not only allows you to set up your pages in that language, but that they also offer technical support. The smartest move is to find a host that supports all of the possibilities, especially if you plan on learning different scripting or want to outsource parts of your programming. Because you will want the ability to collect and organize information from your visitors, it’s important that the web host also offers database capabilities that work with the different languages.

DIFFERENT FEATURES AVAILABLE

Space usually accounts for the biggest differences in pricing of web hosts. The trick here is not to get the minimum amount of space you need. While it might seem like you won’t need so much space right now, you want to be optimistic and plan on expanding your online capabilities. After all, companies that are not online don’t have a chance of growing in this high tech age.

Multiple domain hosting is a newer feature offered by some hosts. In the past, you had to have separate accounts for different domain names. For example, if you are a corporation with different subsidiaries that each have domain names, there wasn’t a good way to integrate all of your sites. Now you will find multiple domains at one site such at http://Maxmillian.net. You can host three domains under one corporate account for $14.41/month. This works out to $4.80 per site per month with 4Gigs of space to share. These kinds of hosting companies allow you to manage everything from one account, and to keep your separate domain names. This is a lifesaver for busy webmasters of larger companies.

Some hosts now offer free domain name registration. Getting a free domain name as part of your hosting plan is a good deal. Even though prices of registering domains have come down a lot in the past few years, it is still money and time saved – especially if the plan is inexpensive as well.

SO WHAT TYPE OF PLAN SHOULD YOU CHOOSE?

SPACE TO GROW

Whatever hosting plan you choose should include plenty of space to grow. Even if right now you only have more of a “brochureware” site, you will want the capability to grow. As more and more visitors are getting high-speed connections, many of the slower-loading features that were annoying in the past are now commonplace. You can make your site more exciting by adding some dynamic features and making it more interactive. It means less interaction time spent with your staff, a more informative site, and it just looks better. More advanced sites reflect well on your business, especially if your business is anything remotely technical. Better looking, smooth, easy-to-navigate sites make visitors feel that your business is more competent.

SUBDOMAINS

You might want to choose a plan that offers subdomains. If you aren’t familiar with subdomains, they are just domains within your domain. A good example is Yahoo. If you’ve ever been to their site, you will notice they are organized and divided with subdomains appearing before the domain in the address. For example, games.yahoo.com will take you to the games subdomain and mail.yahoo.com to the email section. Subdomains make things more organized, easier for you to manage, and easier for your visitors to navigate.

EMAIL ACCOUNTS

You will also want email accounts in your plan. When you have your own domain name, your business is instantly more respectable. The same is true for email accounts. It is much more professional to have email addresses @yourdomainname.com. You want every worker who will be corresponding with customers to have their own email account. You also want a large number of email aliases. An email alias is simply an email address that goes to a different account. For example, on your customer service page, you don’t want to show the email as susan.jones@yourdomain.com. It’s not very professional looking, and there’s a chance it will change. Instead, you can have an email alias such as customerservice@yourdomain.com that actually goes to susan.jones@yourdomain.com so Susan can take care of the customer service problem.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

There is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to contact customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If a host simply provides email customer service, keep looking. No matter what your level of expertise, you will at some point need customer service. When your site is not available, you lose money and appear unprofessional. Be sure to get live 24/7 support (best) or at least 24/7 phone support available.

TRANSFER OF DATA

Hosts limit how much data can be transferred to and from their site every month. While you might not think you will use that much data, you still want room to grow – especially when most hosts charge big if you go over the limit of your plan. Big or unlimited amounts will be one less thing for you to worry about.

IN CONCLUSION Whichever type of plan you choose, if you choose a good host, they will help you figure out your specific needs and provide a lot of support to help you with every aspect of your site design and maintenance.

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