Initially setting up a blog/website can be fairly daunting, especially if you have never done so before. As it can be difficult to find a guide to the best way to go about it, here is my not so brief guide to selecting a host for your website.

Initial Questions

Do I really need to have a hosted website?

This should be the first question you should ask yourself, as it may be that you can do the job just as well using a free option such as Wordpress.com or Blogger. If the main reason you want a hosted website is that you dont want a madeupname.freeblog.com address but a custom domain name then don’t worry as many of these sites now have options to use (and buy) custom domain names through them. Another advantage of sites like Wordpress.com and Blogger is that they can also generate traffic through directing other users of their service to your blog.

These sites do have some limitations however, firstly Wordpress.com does not allow money-tization of their blogs and your choice of layouts is quite limited. You may also have to pay to do some things that you can do for free on hosted websites. Overall though for people just starting out they can be a very useful first step. On a personal level I have used both Wordpress and Blogger and prefer Wordpress despite the money-tization restriction.

Main Advantages of Free Blog Hosts

• Do not cost anything to initially set up
• Can generate traffic from other users of the service
• Help gather an initial “following” for your site

Main Disadvantages of Free Blog Hosts

• Can have restrictions on money-tization of blogs
• Limited Choice of Layouts
• Can charge to customize your blog

Let say you already have a free blog and are looking for the next step, or for whatever reason a free blog host is not for you. The next question you have to ask is.

What type of Hosting?

After you have decided that you are going to have a hosted website, the next question you need to ask is; What type of hosting do I need? Broadly speaking there are three types of hosting available going from “worst to best”: Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers/Virtual Dedicated Servers and Dedicated Hosting.

Shared Hosting

For the vast majority of people a shared hosting plan should be sufficient to meet there needs especially when starting out, and relatively cheap hosting plans are readily available. The main problem with shared hosts occur when your site has outgrown them.

While many hosts now advertise “unlimited” bandwidth, this is slightly misleading as it should be described as “unlimited until your website uses a proportion of the CPU/Memory of the server it is on”. When that occurs you can get into all types of difficulty with your hosting provider and may even lose your website (if you don’t back it up).

Choosing a Shared Host

To be honest there is very little to choose between shared hosts, since unless you are generating a lot of traffic causing strain on there servers or they are a “bad” company the only time you will need to get in touch with them is if you want a new service, to renew a service or cancel a service.

That being said there are a few things you should look out for

1) Bandwidth and Storage Limits

While a lot of hosting providers now offer “unlimited” bandwidth and storage some do not and you need to ensure your package is up to the job. If using a largely text with a few images based site work on the assumption that 5000 hits = 1GB bandwidth

2) How many “databases” per account and is the PhP and SQL up to date

A database can be thought of as an application or add on to your website like a forum, shopping cart or Wordpress installation. There is a good chance that you will want to run something like this (note the more “applications” you run the more CPU resources you will use), and each one will probably require a separate database so ensure that you will have enough for what you want your site to do.

In terms of PhP and SQL if you want to install Wordpress you will need PHP 4.3 or greater, MySQL 4.0 or greater. Though you should probably make sure that the host is running version 5 of both.

3) What do I get for my money?

You should also look to see what else comes with the package, many hosts throw in a domain name for free on certain packages and other “goodies” such as a site builder. You should also look out for hidden “setup” fees especially on basic packages. Another thing to note is that most prices are exclusive of VAT so you will need to add a bit of money to that fee.

Another thing to ask is how easy is it to set up your “databases”/”applications” some hosts have a control panel (cPanel) which allows you to install these quite easily using a fantastico script, otherwise you may have to do it manually which can be overwhelming for some people.

4) Who do I Use?

This site is hosted by and I found it quite easy to arrange to buy my domain name and hosting package. They also have a lot of additional services available. On a side note if you have hosting elsewhere and want to buy a domain, or just want to buy a domain name and “park it” they are a good place to buy it from, This is because they allow you to “park domains” with them and it is also relatively easy to have the domain name pointed to another host.

The poor points of the service I have noticed are that there cheapest package does not have any databases making it more difficult for new web users. I also found it relatively difficult to get Wordpress up and running as they do not have the Fantastico script (at least not on the package I am on), and the Domain/Hosting Management is poorly designed in comparison to others I have used. There hosting packages are also slightly more restrictive in terms of bandwidth/storage/databases than you can get elsewhere.

I also have sites hosted by . I found their prices to be a bit more expensive than the cheapest hosts, but to offer a good quality package. They also use cPanel and the fantastico scripts making it easy to set up “applications” like Wordpress.

The main problem I have with hostpapa is that it is relatively difficult to buy additional services from them! as I wanted to get an extra domain name and it took a few days to get sorted.

At the end of the day the best thing to do is have a look around and decide which provider is best for you remembering that you get what you pay for, feel free to post details of any good or bad hosts in the comments section

Advantages of Shared Hosts

• Relatively Cheap
• Can Customise and Money-terize your site more readily than with free sites like Wordpress
• Lots of Choice

Disadvantages of Shared Hosts

• Bandwidth not really “Unlimited”
• Bandwidth can be “squeezed” due to popular websites on the same server
• Issues can arise when the site grows too popular
• Quality of Service between hosts can vary considerably

Knowing When To Upgrade

This is a very difficult question to answer as bandwidth used will be different for each site and depend on what you are hosting on your site sites hosting flash games/videos will take up more bandwidth than sites that just host text and images. There is also the issue that shared server limitations are often caused by spikes in traffic.

That being said using an estimate derived from my text and image based shared hosted sites is that 5000 page views is roughly equivalent to 1GB of bandwidth I would say that if you are on an “unlimited plan” and consistently getting more than 3000 page views per day you may need to start thinking about moving to a VPS or Dedicated host. The other issue is spikes so it may be most days you are below that but occasionally get sharp rises in page views which can also cause issues.

Knowing when to upgrade will of course be partly dependent on what hosts and package you are on, as with the better shared hosts you may still be comfortably within their bandwidth/CPU limits. My advice would be that if your think your site is popular (regularly gets over 3000 hits per day) get in touch with your hosting company to see if you are at risk of exceeding there CPU or Bandwidth limits.

Virtual Private Servers

Virtual Private/Dedicated Servers are the next step up from Shared Hosting, but operate on a similar principle in that you are on a single server with multiple users. The main difference is that you now have a guaranteed “slice of the server pie”. To put it simple if a VPS and Shared Host both had 100 CPU “units” and 50 users, each VPS user would have a guaranteed slice of 2 CPU “Units” but no more, while on a Shared Host every user could potentially use up to 100 “Units”. This means in theory your website could run better on a Shared Host than on a VPS especially when comparing high end shared hosting vs low end VPS.

The advantage of VPS is that you do get a guaranteed share of resources and are not at the mercy of other sites on your host, and that your website is normally more secure and you have a dedicated IP address. You also can have control server management, though this can be overwhelming for some users.

Advantages of VPS

• Guaranteed Amount of Server Resources
• More Control over Server
• Typically better performance than Shared Hosts
• Website More Secure with its own IP address

Disadvantages of VPS

• Typically More Expensive than Shared Hosts
• Unmanaged packages can be demanding to control
• Low end packages could give you worse performance than Shared Hosts

Dedicated Hosts

If you have exhausted all other options for your website, and it has outgrown shared hosting and VPS then you will have to go for dedicated hosting. There is not really that much to say about Dedicated Hosting since you get as the name suggests a single server dedicated to your website(s), but as you might expect it also normally costs the most of any of the hosting options, and can have the same problems as VPS if you get an unmanaged package.

Advantages of Dedicated Hosts

• A whole server to yourself
• Even more freedom in what you can run

Disadvantages of VPS/Dedicated Hosts

• The cost