Hello, my friends. Today what I want to blog about is a small tutorial about web hosting, whose purpose is to explain how it works and how to choose it wisely to the ones of you who are currently using free hosts or subdomain accounts.

*NOTE: the following advice ONLY comes from my direct experience, so don’t take it all for granted. Use it as a starting point for a more in-depth research of your own. That’s how knowledge and experience gets built.

What it is
By the term ‘web hosting‘ we define a type of Internet service that allows clients to place their hypertext files (or more programming language compiled files) on specific powerful remote computers called ‘servers‘. Every server, like ordinary computers, runs on an Operative System (OS) that varies (Microsoft Windows, Linux, etc.), thus making each hosting provider different in term of language and applications supported.

How to choose
Reading web hosting reviews can help greatly upon checking out all the available possibilities for your budget, because it allows you to compare not just prices, but the price/performance ration, which is fundamental to guarantee a full efficienty of your websites and/or blogs. Sometimes, when we run into uptime troubles, not enough cPanel resources (webspace, bandwidth, addon domains, etc.), we realize – too late – that we’ve chosen a hosting provider that doesn’t meet our needs at all. Switching hosts can be costy at times, so it’s always better to plan first, and buy then.

Planning tips
Before purchasing a hosting plan, write down a few lines on paper about your website:
- will my site be a blog/personal site or more like a small business site?
- is it going to need a lot of bandwidth/traffic?
- how much data do I wish to upload? Is a small plan (1GB or less) enough to meet my need?
- do I need server support for specific dynamic languages, such like PHP, ASP, Java, etc.?
- would I need frequent client support from the host’s behalf?
These questions are only guidelines, but I’m sure you get the point: before purchasing a specific hosting plan, you MUST make sure it’s going to meet your website needs, and that can only be provided when you have a clear idea (not ‘totally’ clear, but close to it) of what your website is going to be and need.

And with that, I shall conclude this short article. Questions are welcome!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 8:50 pm and is filed under friends, hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.