Linux Community Magazine

When you thing of developing a website two primary thing come in mind, #1- What is the name of the website and #2 - Where to host the website? In this article I am going to share some of the important factor to be considered for choosing the web hosting company. Out there 1000 of web hosting companies are available, this article will sure help you to choose best one, through this article. Below are the few checklists for you. Here discussed both general and technical aspects. I have segregated this article in two sections.

1) How to choose good web hosting - General Aspect:2) How to choose good web hosting - Technical Aspect:

Server Side Scripting Support: This is very important aspect to be considered when choosing the web hosting. Try to find out what scripting language supported by web hosting. All web hosting can handle.html pages. Apart from this try to what other scripting language is supported by the hosting. There are many scripting languages, but famous scripting language like PHP and ASP for server side scripting. If your web host support scripting language then you have option of developing both static as well as dynamic website.

Linux or Window Server:- Check which OS your hosting server run on. If it Linux server, beware that.ASP scripting will not work here. From my personal opinion, I always prefer to have Linux server, Apache as web server and script language as PHP. This is because a lot many features are available in Linux including security.

Database Support: When you plan to develop dynamic and content management system (CMS) website, one of the most important and essential layer of your project design will be database. Check with the hosing, whether provide database like MySQL, with latest version. Also check whether the database support stored procedure (SP - a precompiled query). This helps in retrieving and storing the database many times faster than ordinary SQL statement, which ultimately result in website response. There are web hosting which provide 10-100 database schemas.

Access to Configuration Files: If the web hosting is Linux server, Apache web server and scripting language is PHP, than definitely you should consider this point. Check whether you have access to edit #1 ) "php.ini" - which helps to define library path for your website, otherwise you will be ending up in writing the code for loading library files. #2).htaccess file- Check whether you are allowed to place this file in hosing and also check whether your Linux server can recognize this file. This is because; it helps in defining clean URL and in turn helps in SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

SSH Access: If the hosting is Linux server check whether you are allowed to access your home folder through third party tools SSH Client/ Putty tools. The advantage of this is by installing these tools in your local PC you will be able to access to the home folder in hosting server in much faster manner than through Control Panel. From my personal point of view, I find this very essential for my development process, to analyse my logs for exception in minutes and helps a lot in correcting/fixing the issues.

Sub domains: Check how many sub domains also allowed per domain and also charge for each sub domains.

Parking the domains: Domain parking is, you register domain name in one companying and pointing that domain name to this hosting. Some web hosting company does not allow parking the domains, but most do. Check, if yes, then your lucky, because there many company were you can register the domain name at very very low cost. By this way you can register many domain names and park them (pointing) to currently hosting company were website is hosted.

Transferring the domains: This supported by almost all the web hosting company. If you feel that your currently hosted company is not up to your satisfaction, you can transfer the domain and hosting to another web hosting company which satisfies your need, this will avoid registering new domain and also preserve your page indexing data if it is already done by search engines.

Web hosting Details here: /VerySimpleCMS/web/pages/webhost/webhost.html