Julie Halitzka

What to look for in a webhost

I’ve had a couple of different people ask me about what to look for in web hosting over the last couple of days. For anyone else who might be interested, here is the list.

Things to look for:

• Price
• Customer support – will you get a human? What are their hours?
• Uptime – how often do their servers go down?
• What is their administrative interface – Cpanel is a nice way to go
• Number of email accounts you can have
• Number of domains you can have, cost of domain if you purchase it from your host
• Number of subdomains (ie… I have my sites on 3 subdomains, music.julie-h.com, blog.julie-h.com, portfolio.julie-h.com. The subdomain is that first part instead of www.)
• Do they have a Statistics package so you can monitor traffic on the server?
• Do they have any scripts built in that you can choose to install?
• Number of MySQL databases (a lot of pre-installed scripts each need a database)
• Technologies supported – not every server will let you do .asp, or .php, or Frontpage extensions, etc.
• Bandwidth – Are you planning on using many audio or video files? You will need a large amount of bandwidth for users to download your video and audio
• Streaming – Does the site allow you to stream audio and video files, if you will be using alot of those? This means people can start watching the media before it’s finished downloading
• File space