Web Hosting Solutions Guide

In the last article, you saw the way Servers work, and how a web page is delivered to your browser. Today’s article builds on this background, and tries to show one way by which this process is achieved.

The Important things to worry about when you’re deciding on what sort of hosting plan to use are listed below. Keep in mind that different businesses require different levels of the qualities listed below. Higher levels mean that the cost is consequently more. Let us call these Key Parameters.

Uptime: This refers to what percentage of the time the Server is available for use. It’s obvious that you want this percentage of time to be as close to 100% as possible. Most Providers will guarantee 99.9% uptime. However, this usually refers to the time that the Server is on, and Electricity is provided. Make sure that you find out what the real uptime is, after deducting Server errors, Virus attacks etc.

Support: To what extent is your Provider is going to help you out with the Server. Is he going to maintain the hardware, Operating System, the environment in which it is maintained, or the software which runs the Server?

Different Services: Various Providers offer several services other than plain web hosting. You will need to know what you want. More services, means more cost.

Bandwidth: Bandwidth refers to the rate at which data is transferred. If your provider provides you with more bandwidth, it means that your site is going to load faster, and you will be less hit when there is a sudden rush of visitors to your website.

So let us start with a discussion on the cheapest type of Hosting that you can have:

Free Hosting Services

Simply put, Free Hosting is where the Provider allows you to put up Web Pages on his Server and access them via the Internet for Free. Naturally, it cannot provide you with high levels of Key Parameters. However, for personal and family Websites, this is often not an issue, as they are not business critical.

The following are the issues that arise because of free web hosting

1. You don’t get your own domain name. What this means is that if your company name is ‘Brad Financial Services’, you won’t be able to access your page with www.bradfinancialservices.com. Instead, if your providers name is Ector, you will probably get www.bradfinancialservices.ector.com. This is called a sub domain, where your name is a part of a larger domain, namely www.ector.com.

Once more, this is not something that you would want as a business. A corporate website is expected to have its own domain, and it is unlikely that your clients would get a good impression if they knew that you didn’t have your own domain name.

2. Advertisements will be placed in your website. Hosting companies providing free hosting, have to recover their costs in some way or the other. They do this by placing advertisements of their clients on all the free hosted pages.

Once more, this may be fine for a non business website, but it’s totally inappropriate for a professional business.

3. You get a very Limited Bandwidth per Month. We mustn’t confuse the word ‘Bandwidth’ here, as it is used in terms of data transfer, to the more precise and mathematical definition it has in the branch of physics called Signal Processing.

In this case, it simply means that you cannot transfer more than a very limited amount of data to and from the website. This limit is not feasible for a corporate web page which, by its very nature needs far more bandwidth than can be expected from a free hosting service

4. Several other restrictions like limited file size, limitations on hot linking (That means placing a link on your webpage, so that say, an image is loaded from another location, and not the server from where the rest of the page came from), and restrictions on the types of files that can be placed on the website.

Depending on the type of company that is providing the free web hosting, other services may be bundled with the plan like email, FTP (File Transfer Protocol), some basic Database Support, and perhaps some forums.

That’s it! Now you know most of what you need to know about Free Web Hosting. Business that cannot do with this, utilize other solutions, of which we will read about in the Next Article – ‘Shared Hosting’