What Should Web Hosting Services Provide You?
Most people don’t really think about their web host beyond purchasing space from them and asking help to put a web site up – but there’s a lot more to it, both from you and from your web host. Space And Time Are Related Online, Too This is more true on the web than you’d expect; the amount of space a download occupies on your server is going to directly affect the amount of time it takes to download it. And your web hosting service should be able to advise you on how to reduce both time and space. The standard amount of space web hosting services provide these days is a gigabyte or more (with free ISPs, it’s less, more like 10-100 megabytes). For most sites, that’s more than enough in the beginning; but if you are hosting lots of graphics on your web site, or if you plan to run an ecommerce site with catalog and shopping cart, you are likely to need more. And your web hosting service should be able to help you determine exactly how much more. That’s great for static memory – the amount of space allotted on a server. But you also have to take into consideration movement – your website requires bandwidth, the type of memory that allows for transferring data from one site (the server) to another (the customer’s computer). Web hosting services allow a contracted amount of download from your web site, with each page view and each viewed graphic counting against that total. Yes, I said viewed – in order to see a web page, your user has to view the web page. If you run a site heavy in images, you may want to consider either decreasing the number of images per page or increasing the amount of bandwidth your ISP provides. High traffic web sites also increase the amount of bandwidth your web hosting service needs to allow, so be certain you discuss that with them as well. Security Is Vital If your customers pay online with credit cards or Paypal, you want to be sure they can’t be ripped off. Your web hosting service should offer you a secure site for your financial transactions. This ensures that when your customer enters their private financial information, it is transmitted to your web server in military-level encryption, protected from interception by thieves who lurk online around financial web sites. You don’t want to get the reputation of having low security! Nifty Programs and Shopping Carts, and Other Things to Consider If you’re running an ecommerce web site or a complex web site using databases or non-standard HTML, you almost certainly need a web hosting provider who supports CGI, FrontPage Extensions, or whatever extra you are using. If you’re planning to spam, just don’t. You will get kicked off your host’s server – WILL. Web service providers are being put in the position of legal responsibility for things like that, and they take it very seriously. If you’re planning a web site with adult content, you need to be honest with your web hosting provider. Some providers do not tolerate pornography, either in images or in text. The adult content exclusion will be in the contract you sign, and if you violate that, they can legally