Choosing A Web Host
Types of Web Hosting Plans
Dedicated Web Hosting
With dedicated web hosting, you lease a complete server from a web host, and you have complete control over how that server is configured and used. Many companies advertise dedicated servers for as low as $100 per month, but low-cost dedicated servers perform worse than typical shared hosting accounts.
A good, entry-level dedicated server will run at least $250 to $350 per month with common options included. And they can take quite some time to setup. I generally spend the better part of a week patching and upgrading software, tweaking the system, and documenting setup and establishing relationships.
Shared Web Hosting
In a shared web hosting account, you are typically placed on a high-powered server, but you are sharing that server with 300 or more other people (if you are lucky). With more powerful servers, some hosts will crowd 600 to 1,200 sites on a single server! It sounds like a lot, but in practice, the sites with which you are sharing are usually low volume, so you get better response times than with a VPS or dedicated server. Some plans provide an administrative panel used to control your site, including things like e-mail accounts, databases, and third-party software like WordPress.
Virtual Private Server
A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a hybrid of shared hosting and dedicated hosting. You typically share a server with 30 to 40 other people, and you have complete administrative control over your segregated area of that server.
VPS plans are great if you need the flexibility of using exotic software, but the entry-level plans often perform atrociously, because you are competing with 30 to 40 other power users for processor time and bandwidth. I’ve “upgraded” from shared hosting accounts to VPS accounts only to see my page response times jump to 5 to 6 seconds per page from the under 1-second response times I was getting on the shared platform. If you use a virtual private server, you will want to upgrade at least to a mid-range plan.
Specialty Hosting
There are other much less popular types of hosting accounts. For the most part, we can over-look them, because they fulfill exotic niches, but two similar types of specialty hosting I’d like to point out are grid service and cloud hosting.
Grid computing and cloud computing spread processing load over hundreds of different servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email. They eliminate many road-blocks and single points of failure that will inevitably be experienced in most any hosting account. In essence, your server’s computing power can expand and contract at will to meet the demands placed on it.
Grid and cloud computing are great concepts, but are comparably untested and unproven. Current feedback seems to be that service and response times are fantastic–when the service is accessible. Specialty hosting should definitely be monitored, and it shouldn’t be many months before it’s a viable, if not preferred, solution.
Which Is Best?
For my money, I prefer to use shared hosting for blogs, provided that I use a host that offers a well-equipped account. By well-equipped, I mean that you can host multiple domains under one account, you get a large amount of storage and bandwidth, you are provided with good support, and your server is equipped with popular software packages.
If I expect a blog to receive a large amount of traffic, I’ll move it to a dedicated server and assess traffic levels for a few months before moving it back to a shared account. I’ve just started using specialty hosting, and while I like the concept (and it has responded better than shared hosting to traffic spikes), there are still a few wrinkles they need to iron out of their systems.
If you have just started looking into blogs, then undoubtedly, shared hosting is right for you. It will take some time before you outgrow it, but if you do, migrating a WordPress installation to another hosting account can be made seamless for your readers with a little effort.
Choosing A Host
Finding a good host can be a challenge. Google any terms that are related to hosting accounts and you’ll get pages of results describing the “top web hosts.” The problem is that most of these types of sites are run by web hosts, or by people affiliated with web hosts. Getting an unbiased opinion about which services are best requires a lot more digging.
A good place to start is by compiling a list of all of the top hosts and ruling out any expensive, inflexible, or poorly equipped plans. Then you probably want to determine how good or bad support is at each of those hosts.
One way to gauge how hosts treat their customers is to find out which message boards their customers frequent (including the host’s own boards), and use their posts to gauge sentiment. Combine that information with independent verification of hosts’ network uptime and throughput, and you’ll have a good list of hosting candidates. I did just that!
I use Lunar Pages, BlueHost, and Host Gator exclusively for shared hosting, and have used them for years. I prefer Lunar Pages over BlueHost because I have more experience with them, they have terrific support resources, and they’ve been very good to me when my site traffic has swamped their servers. Their forums alone contain more than 300,000 posts – this is a treasure trove of information! But you can’t go wrong with either of them, and I use them both.
What I have noticed–and this is purely anecdotal–is that Lunar Pages’ network seems to be more reliable than Bluehost’s, but Lunar Pages hardware is less reliable.
HostGator usually has fantastic response times, but when they falter, they tend to do so in a big way, which can be quite disruptive. Still, I have several HostGator accounts with which I’m pleased.
Another possibility that is worth examining is Media Temple. I’ve only used them for one hosting account, and that account hasn’t received enough traffic to fully test their services, but they offer grid service hosting.
“Grid-Service is a completely new hosting service that replaces yesterday’s obsolete shared server technology. We’ve eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email.” In essence, your server’s computing power can expand and contract at will to meet the demands placed on it.
Similar to Media Temple is Mosso, which was founded by Rackspace employees and funded by the company. They use a cloud computing concept, and the idea is similar to Media Temple. Expand and contract the computing power available depending on the demands placed on it. These types of accounts will cost a bit more, but they should be able to handle high traffic loads better than shared or VPS hosting.
If you expect to be abusing your host’s server and network, consider Spry for VPS hosting and iWeb or Liquid Web for dedicated hosting. I use iWeb and I have colleagues who use Liquid Web. Liquid Web is slightly less expensive and offers a few more bells and whistles for free (along with more comprehensive setup assistance), but iWeb has been very good to me.