1.Amount of web space
Does it have enough space for your needs? If you envisage that you will expand your site eventually, you might want to anticipate future expansion. Most sites use less than 200MB of web space. Indeed, at one time, one of my other web sites, ec2biz.com, used less than 200MB of space although it had about 80 pages on the site. Your needs will vary, depending on how many pictures your pages use, whether you need video clips, sound files, etc.
2.Reliability and speed of access
This is extremely important of online shop. A site that is frequently down will lose a lot of visitors. If someone finds your site on the search engine, and he tries to access it but find that it is down, he’ll simply go down the list to find another site. If you can’t get feedback from anyone, one way is to try it out yourself over a period of time, both during peak as well as off-peak hours. After all, it is free, so you can always experiment with it. Slow access is also very frustrating for visitors (and for you too, when you upload your site). How do you know if a host is reliable or fast?
3.PHP and/or Perl
It’s quite possible for a website to work even without PHP or Perl access. For example, you can always use one of the many free script hosting services available that provide counters, search engines, forms, polls, mailing lists, etc, have requiring you to dabble with Perl or PHP or CGI scripts.
However if you really want to do it yourself, with the minimum of advertising banners from these web providers, you will need either PHP or Perl or CGI access.
Note that it is not enough to know they provide PHP or Perl or CGI access: you need to know the kind of environment your scripts run under: is it so restrictive that they are of no earthly use? For PHP or CGI scripts, does your web host allow you to use the mail() function, which allows your scripts to send email? For Perl scripts, do you have access to sendmail (a computer program) or its workalike?
4.Bandwidth allotment
Nowadays, many web hosts impose a limit on the amount of traffic your website can use per day and per month. This means that if the pages (and graphic images) on your site is loaded by visitors beyond a certain number of times per month (or per year), the web host will disable your web site (or perhaps send you a bill). It is difficult to recommend a specific minimum amount of bandwidth, since it depends on how you design your site, your target audience, and the number of visitors you’re able to attract to your site. In general, 512MB traffic per month is too little for anything other than your personal home page and 5-10GB traffic per month is usually adequate for a simple site just starting out. Your mileage, however, will vary.
5.Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)
Data transfer (sometimes loosely referred to as “traffic” or “bandwidth“) is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site.
In addition, while traffic bandwidth provided is something you should always check, do not be unduly swayed by promises of incredibly huge amounts of bandwidth. Chances are that your website will never be able to use that amount because it will hit other limits, namely resource limits. For more details, see the article The Fine Print in Web Hosting: Resource Usage Limits.
To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives or provide files, video or music on their site use less than 30 GB of bandwidth per month. Your traffic requirements will grow over time, as your site becomes more well-known (and well-linked), so you will need to also check their policy when you exceed your data transfer limit: is there a published charge per one GB over the allowed bandwidth? Is the charge made according to actual usage or are you expected to pre-pay for a potential overage? It is better not to go for hosts that expect you to prepay for overages, since it is very hard to forsee when your site will exceed its bandwidth and by how much.
6.Disk space
For the same reason as bandwidth, watch out also for those “disk space” schemes. Many web sites (that don’t host files, videos or music) need less than 1024 MB of web space, so even if you are provided with a host that tempts you with 2048 GB (or “space”), be aware that you are unlikely to use that space, so don’t let the 128 GB space be too big a factor in your consideration when comparing with other web hosts. The hosting company is also aware of that, which is why they feel free to offer you that as a means of enticing you to host there. As a rough gauge, ec2biz.com, which had about 300 pages when this article was first written, used less than 50 MB for its pages and associated web site files.
7.Technical support
Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (often abbreviated 24/7), all year around? Note that I will not accept a host which does not have staff working on weekends or public holidays. You will be surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times.
Incidentally, just because a host advertises that it has 24/7 support does not necessarily mean that it really has that kind of support. Test them out by emailing at midnight and on Saturday nights, Sunday mornings, etc. Check out how long they take to respond. Besides speed of responses, check to see if they are technically competent. You wouldn’t want to sign up for a web hosting that is run by a bunch of salesmen who only know how to sell and not fix problems.
8.Email, Autoresponders, POP3, SMTP Mail Forwarding
If you have your own site, you will probably want to have email addresses at your own domain, like sales@domain.com, etc. Does the host provide this with the package? Does it allow you to have a catch-all email account that causes any email address at your domain to be routed to you? Can you set an email address to automatically reply to the sender with a preset message (called an autoresponder)? Can you retrieve your mail with your software? Can it be automatically forwarded to your current e-mail address?
9.Control Panel
This is called various names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and at the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account. I will not sign up for a hosting where I have to go through their technical support each time I want to change a password or add/delete an email account. Such chores are common maintenance chores that every webmaster performs time and time again, and it would be a great hassle if you had to wait for their technical support to make the changes for you.
10.Web Server and Operating System
Is the type of operating system and server important? Whether you think so or not on the theoretical level, there are a few practical reasons for looking out for the type of server.
Otherwise my preference is to sign up for accounts using the often cheaper, more stable and feature-laden Unix systems running the Apache server. In fact, if dynamically generated pages that can mysql databases is what you want, you can always use the more portable (and popular) PHP or CGI instead of tying yourself down to ASP. Another reason to prefer Linux web hosts (which include web hosts using systems like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc) using the Apache web server is that these servers allow you to configure a lot of facilities that you typically need on your site (error pages, protecting your images, blocking email harvesters, blocking IP, etc) without having to ask your web host to implement them. Knowledge about configuring Apache servers is also widely available, and can be found on ec2biz.com Configuring Apache and .htaccess pages as well.
