Different needs different features
If you have determined your needs, choosing the right hosting package is just a matter of selecting the features needed to fulfill those needs. You have found a couple of web hosts and each has one or two packages that fit your hosting budget. We will analyze a few “real-life” possible situations.
If your site is going to be developed by others, it’s a good thing to ask them about the web technologies they will use to develop and run the website. Based on this kind of information, the first thing you should consider is choosing the operating system of the web server: either Linux hosting servers or Windows hosting servers. After that, make sure the hosting package has the features needed. If your site is developed using JSP (Java Servlet Pages), make sure your web host offers this feature, because JSP pages need a different kind of web server, which is not always offered as a “standard feature”.
Besides finding out the name of the web technologies used, you should also pay attention to the version number. The web programming languages are continuously improved and developed, new features are added, bugs are fixed, etc. This is the reason why it’s important to have a web host that has an updated version of that language on their server or at least one that is compatible with your website. If your site is developed using code from a newer version of a programming language, placing the website on a web host that has on older version might result in unexpected behavior of the pages. And it will not be the programmers’ fault! It should not be a problem the other way around, so usually if the host’s technologies’ version is newer; it is compatible with websites developed with older versions.
Where to look for all these web technologies? In the hosting plan’s detailed specifications you might see features like MySQL 5.x, PHP4 or PHP5, etc. This means that the host’s MySQL database server is at least version 5.0 or that you can deploy websites coded in PHP version 4 and/or 5.
“Real-Life” Examples
Small websites.
In this category we include family web sites, “sales letter” type of sites, personal blogs, small companies’ online presence, etc. These types of sites require a minimum amount of disk space and a low to medium amount of bandwidth. They are usually developed in HTML/PHP and do not require a database server. The most common way of uploading and updating the website is through a FTP file transfer.
Recommended hosting packages: All-Purpose Hosting, Beginner Hosting.
Selling online.
It’s easy to do. Just go on the E-bay website! But besides selling on E-bay, your own “online shop” can translate into higher revenues from additional sales. A small e-commerce website is the right tool to sell online either you’re a small family owned company starting up or an established E-bay seller. The website now has to accommodate online ordering, stock control, and the ability to create and edit products and products’ categories and so on. Most of these features are provided by a shopping cart (Javascript, PHP or ASP based carts). Small e-commerce sites usually have a lot of scripts that handle the different features needed like: automated e-mails, mailing lists, integrated credit card payment processing, etc. It becomes very important to have a hosting server with the features to run all of the scripts. The average uptime of the host is also an issue, because downtimes can mean less sales.
Recommended hosting packages: All-Purpose Hosting, VPS / Dedicated Hosting.
Advanced E-commerce.
An advanced e-commerce implies the presence of an administration area with more options for order processing and customer support. Heavy scripting to accommodate the additional features might require additional packages to be installed and if the host doesn’t have or install them on demand, they have to at least give SSH access to the programmers to do that. FTP only access is no longer suitable. Depending on the estimated traffic, you should consider dedicated or collocated servers for increased resources availability (bandwidth and disk space) and server access. In order to prevent loosing data, the hosting server should provide automatic periodic back-ups.
Recommended hosting packages: E-commerce Hosting, Dedicated / VPS Hosting.
