How To Choose Website Hosting
I’m going to describe the best way to choose website hosting here for the “average guy” (or “average gal”).
I’m going to explain in a no-nonsense, no-hold barred, “I get nothing out of this” type way. . .
Here goes. . .
So the first thing you should be considering in your search for website hosting is your needs as a business owner or a personal website owner.
If you’re personal website owner, are you planning to monetize your website??
This means placing ads on your site to generate revenue, having affiliate links on your site to generate revenue of anything else that may earn you a few bucks for someone taking some defined action on your website.
If you’re monetizing your site, well, here’s something you need to know right now: You’re not hosting a personal website anymore — instead you just joined the “business owners” class of website owner.
Now before I go on to explain the difference in hosting, let me first point out that if you’re a personal website owner, you could still be subject to the same circumstances as a business website owner (i.e. you could end up getting a lot of traffic to your website). But still, let’s examine what it is to be a personal website owner:
Personal Website Owners:
This is you if the following apply. . .
- Website is for family use (or) website is only for a couple of people you know to see stuff you publish about you or your family, etc.
- Website will not have ads on it, or any other means of generating revenue.
So now, that you know who you are, here are some things to consider. . .
- Will you be monetizing this site at some point?
- Will you depend on this to become an entrepreneur and rely on this as your sole source of income at some point?
- Does down-time matter to you (meaning when your website is offline)?
- Are you concerned about getting your e-mails delivered to people you send e-mail messages to?
If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, you are probably going to become a “business website owner” at some point, and therefore those rules will apply to you as shown below.
For now, if none of those things apply to you, then in that case you will do fine with shared website hosting, with a company like HostGator, or BlueHost.
Now, if on the other hand you fit into the other class of website owners. . .
Business Website Owners:
This is you if the following apply. . .
- This website is your “bread and butter” (meaning you depend on it for your income, and while it may not be your SOLE source of income, you still depend on the income this website generates for you).
- Website may derive its revenue from ads, affiliate links, products or other services you may be selling/offering.
Now that you know who you are, here are something you as a business owner need to consider:
- Can you afford downtime (meaning can you afford for your website to be offline, except during schedule maintenance times)??
- Can you afford interruptions in your business operations due to your website being offline, or e-mail not working, or any other problem related to your website??
- Do you plan to send out e-mails to your users or subscribers at any point?
- Is it important to you that those e-mail do not get marked as SPAM?
If the above things are important to you — join the club!
So now, let me explain the differences between Shared Hosting, VPS hosting, and Dedicated Server Hosting.
SHARED HOSTING:
COST: $0.99 per month – $21.95 per month
(Low)
As its named suggests, it means you are “sharing” a hosting server with other website owners. If you’re running a personal or family website, this is typically no cause for concern. However, if you’re running a business website, it may appear on the surface that shared hosting is a good idea, due to low costs. In my experience, I have found that 95% of my clients have chosen shared hosting due to cost alone — meaning that they didn’t look at *any* other factors in choosing their hosting provider.
On a shared hosting server, you are typically sharing a server with hundreds, thousands, or sometimes tens-of-thousands of other website owners.
This practice is egregious, and hurts you if you’re a business owner, because it puts your website and business at risk. This practice is known as overselling, and website hosting provider that sells you this kind of hosting is known as an “Oversold Host”. It’s so nuts that it even earned itself a write-up in Wikipedia! Basically, it means that a hosting provider promises everyone they sell an hosting account that they will have “unlimited space” and “unlimited bandwidth”. Unlimited space is the amount of hard drive space you’re allowed to use on their server, while unlimited bandwidth is the amount of traffic is allowed to and from your website.
Now, up to this point, you may not have known that it is *impossible* for your hosting provider to offer you unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth, because they themselves have limits. For example, each server they own may have a hard drive that is a few hundred Gigabytes (GB) in size, or maybe a few Terabytes (TB) in size. And their upstream provider (Level 3, Cogent Technologies, etc) only allows them a certain amount of bandwidth (otherwise they end up paying THOUSANDS of dollars more in costs for bandwidth — it’s a HOT commodity nowadays. . .even ISP’s are starting to practice this now. My ISP, Comcast allow 250GB of bandwidth per month, but this isn’t to be confused with bandwidth for a website, and is actually explained in another post on my website).
So then how is it that they can offer *YOU* UNLIMITED space and UNLIMITED bandwidth??
The answer is simple. . .they can’t!
Shared hosting companies basically are hedging a bet, that you and the other users on their server will not use much space, or much bandwidth on the server, and the users who do use a lot of space or bandwidth will balance out with the users who do not.
Now, I know at this point, you’re probably thinking to yourself that this is a pretty onerous and bordering on “shady” business practice, and I agree with you — but if you’re setting up a simple family website, it would be hard to deny the low entry cost of getting your website hosted somewhere, and so for these kinds of website, shared hosting usually is a good idea.
Typical shared hosting companies will put restrictions in place that benefit them and NOT you as their customer — these will include things like:
- Excessive CPU usage (any significantly trafficked website)
- Database Usage Volume (any blog website like this one)
- Process Usage (IMAP e-mail accounts are usually the target)
So what defines Excessive CPU usage??
If your website gets any significant amount of traffic, you will fall into this category in some cases (but not all — the restrictions and how they implement them are equally arbitrary).
What defines excessive database usage volume??
Ask any website owner who runs a WordPress Blog on their website, if they get any kind of significant traffic where they host their website, and they will tell you that they use a VPS or Dedicated Server for this, since on a shared host, they may have had their website suspended by the hosting company multiple times, or the worse.
What defines excessive process usage??
Any website owner who sets up their e-mail as an IMAP account (this executes a process on the server for each e-mail account) will tell you that usually around 20-30 e-mail accounts like this will have their shared hosting provider up in arms and suspending their website accounts. An IMAP account is the type of e-mail account that setup would typically use if you want to be able to check your e-mail from your computer (using Outlook, Thunderbird or another e-mail client), from the web (like Gmail, Hotmail, etc), and from your cell phone (using your iPhone, Blackberry, or Android Phone). This allows your e-mail to remain synchronized between all 3 methods, so that if you delete an e-mail on your phone, it deletes on your computer, and also when you check it using webmail. So you can see why IMAP is attractive e-mail option for business owners. Yet, this is one of the things that you can do to get your shared hosting provider to suspend your account — something that helps your business! That doesn’t seem right at all does it??
Typical Shared Hosting Providers:
HostGator.com
GoDaddy.com
iPowerWeb.com
BlueHost.com
DreamHost.com
PowWeb.com
HostMonster.com
Yahoo.com (one of the worst!)
The drawbacks to SHARED hosting that are typically overlooked:
- No rDNS (important in getting your e-mails delivered)
- Non-exclusive SPF records [if at all] (important in getting e-mails delivered and making sure spammers can’t send e-mail pretending to originate from your website)
- Non-exclusive DKIM/DomainKeys signing (important in getting e-mails delivered, and making sure that your e-mails go to the inbox with major mail providers like Yahoo, Gmail, and so forth)
VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting:
COST: $19.95/month – $149/month [depends on configuration]
(MODERATE COST)
As the name suggests, owning a Virtual Private Server can be likened to owning a condo or co-op for example. Where you might have thousands of “tenants” in a shared hosting environment, with a VPS, you would typically only have between 4 and maybe 8 other people on the same server as yours (some providers do push the envelope here too however, so you have to be careful with choosing a VPS provider as well. Some will put more than 8 or 10 people on a single *MAIN* server causing each VPS to be much slower. My recommendations are at the bottom of this page).
The beauty of a VPS is that your server is in a “container” — meaning that your “virtual server” cannot affect another “virtual server” on the *MAIN* server. The hosting provider typically assigns a certain amount of CPU and memory for your server. So for example, in an environment where the *MAIN* server has 8GB of memory for example, if there are 3 other people on the server who also have a “virtual server” then you would each be assigned 2GB of memory by the hosting provider. So you would have a full 2B of memory available to you that you can use however you choose. In addition, they also split the other resources on the *MAIN* server, and will assign hard drive space, and bandwidth as well. That said, if the *MAIN* server has a 320GB hard drive, then the host would typically assign you and the other 3 people on the server 80GB of space on that drive.
Since a VPS is “contained”, this allows you to run your own operating system, your own control panel, have root SSH access, as well as many of the same thing you’d have access to if you had a dedicated server.
This is usually the more cost-effective choice if you are monetizing your website and/or you get a decent amount of traffic and need to get your website up and running in a reliable fashion.
What makes the VPS a good choice is the following:
- You can customize the environment (modify PHP.INI, modify Apache, etc)
- You have full root SSH access (meaning you are the server administrator, you can even host other people’s websites if you choose)
- You can install/remove whatever software you choose (Apache modules, PHP components like ionCube, Zend Optimizer, etc)
- You can have custom DNS (i.e. DNS.YOURSITE.COM for example).
- You can setup your own SPF records and DomainKeys signing for outbound e-mail messages.
- You have your own SSL (i.e. https://www.yoursite.com)
While a VPS is a good choice if you own a website that you’re using for business purposes and monetizing in any way some of the things you will need to do are a bit different, since now you have much more power at your disposal (like Spider-Man’s grandfather said: “With great power comes great responsibility. . .”):
- You will need to secure the server (harden it against outside attacks)
- Close your MTA relay on the server so that it cannot be used to send SPAM messages
- Secure SSH on your system so that it cannot be “brute-forced” — meaning that your server will need to actively block connections that fail password on your SSH port after a certain number of attempts. This will prevent someone from taking over your system.
- Monitor your server for down-time, etc.
So yes, while it is *much* more powerful and makes many more resources available to you to have your own server, it also requires a great deal of responsibility. A VPS is typically a good choice for blog websites that are being monetized, or other moderately trafficked websites.
The drawbacks to VPS hosting that are typically overlooked:
- Higher entry cost (usually costs more than shared hosting)
- Usually requires a server administrator for non-technical website owners to secure server, etc.
- Sometimes VPS are configured just as restrictive as shared servers depending on the hosting provider (numiptent, memsize restrictions, etc).
- Server will typically require PCI compliance for sites that accept credit card transactions.
- SSL Certificates will usually have to be purchased separately.
DEDICATED HOSTING
COST: $100/month – $499/month [depends on configuration]
(HIGH COST)
Now, this is the cream of the crop when it comes to website hosting. If shared hosting is like living in an apartment building, and a VPS is like living in a Condo or Co-Op, then a dedicated server could be likened to having your own house. All of the resources on the server are available to your websites ALONE! Otherwise a dedicated server, is very similar to a VPS, except that no one else is sharing the server with you.
Drawbacks to Dedicated hosting that are typically overlooked:
- Higher cost (priced much higher than shared and VPS in most cases)
- Usually requires a server administrator for the non-technical people
- Will require PCI compliance for website that accept credit cards.
- SSL Certificate usually has to be purchased separately.
CONCLUSION:
So taking all of the hosting types into consideration, you should choose a VPS or Dedicated Server if you are looking to monetize and/or run your business website, while a shared server is a good choice if you’re on a budget and/or are looking to host a personal website and aren’t planning on monetizing your website.
Another mistake I typically see clients make is that they host their website with the design firm or designer who created their website. That’s *BIG* mistake.
Consider the following when your designer or design firm offers to host your website (ask them these questions):
- Does your designer/design firm have the expertise to fix a server issue when it occurs? Most designers are non-experts when it comes to website hosting and typically offer it as a “value-added” service.
- Does your designer know how to mitigate a DDoS attack? A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack would render your website unusable and cause it to go offline. Your designer will typically not know what to do when this occurs.
- Do they keep the server software up-to-date?? Your design is a, well. . .designer. Odds are they aren’t maintaining the server on a weekly basis, and keeping the software up-to-date so that the server doesn’t become exploitable by hackers at large.
- Is their server PCI compliant?? Most designers have no idea what PCI compliance is, and why your merchant account provider will suspend your account (which will prevent you from being able to accept credit cards in your website) if your server is NOT PCI compliant.
- Do they monitor your website for downtime?? Again, since most designers aren’t experts or server administrators and simply offer website hosting as a “value-added” service so that they can make more money off you, they will typically not be monitoring the server in REAL-TIME to prevent downtime. Nor will they wake up at 3AM if your website is offline.
You will definitely want to *AVOID* hosting your website with the same person or company who designed your website, as hosting with your web designer is usually the equivalent of *SHARED HOSTING*.
It’s like hiring your painter to install your home security system — while your painter may know how to make your house look nice because of his job, he’s hardly qualified to install your home security system.
As is the case with the painter example above, the same is true for your designer — they are probably qualified to design your website, but hardly qualified to host your website and even less qualified to make sure it’s secure/PCI compliant, and so forth.
My recommendations are below for SHARED, VPS and Dedicated Hosting Providers, as well as a short description of the company and their strong/weak points. But before we move onto that, I would like to point out ONE additional point.
WINDOWS HOSTING AND LINUX HOSTING:
How to choose between Windows hosting and Linux hosting is another things I’d like to discuss, as I’ve seen many website owners make the mistake of choosing one over the other due to misunderstanding, or lack of information. Okay, first let’s discuss why these are different and how you should choose.
First, you should understand that the MAJORITY of websites on the internet, including Fortune 100 websites are hosted on some kind of Linux platform. Enterprise level servers typically run RHEL (a flavor of Linux).
That said, the only reason you should choose a Windows Server is if you have applications that require it (i.e. your website runs with ASP.net for example, or requires a MS-SQL database). The reason for this is because Windows servers typically have a higher cost of ownership, and don’t do most of the things a properly configured Linux server does right out of the box (i.e. URL rewrites for example).
I have seen clients choose a Windows server because they run Windows on their computer — that is not a good way to make the decision on what platform you’ll use to host your website.
The fact of the matter is that Linux is arguably a much better environment for traditional website hosting.
And I do say this as a Microsoft supporter, and Visual Basic and C# programmer!
SHARED HOSTING PROVIDERS I RECOMMEND:
DreamHost
My Opinion on DreamHost: Having only hosted with them ONE-TIME in my decade long career on the internet, I would have to say that they are a decent hosting company for shared servers.
HostGator
My Opinion on HostGator: HostGator seems to be pretty good with shared hosting, and in 2009 they tried to hire me as a server administrator, so I got to see their operations in person (they flew me out to Texas and everything and put me up in a hotel all at their own cost). They have a pretty good hosting system for shared hosting, but for VPS and Dedicated Hosting you should avoid them. HostGator buys servers from ThePlanet.com/SoftLayer — so in essence they are a middle man. For example, if your server needs a reboot, they can’t do it. They have to contact ThePlanet.com/SoftLayer. I say if you want VPS or Dedicated, just go direct to the source and cut HostGator and their markup on the servers out of the picture.
BlueHost
My Opinion on BlueHost: I’ve never hosted with BlueHost, but have moved clients to/from BlueHost and they seem to have good tech support, and they use a customized version of an industry standard platform (cPanel), which makes it a snap to move to another host away from them if they ever do anything to piss you off.
Why I don’t recommend GoDaddy, Yahoo, 1&1, Arvixe, Globat, iPowerweb, or any other ‘non-standard’ shared hosting provider, and here’s why:
GoDaddy and Yahoo have proprietary interfaces and systems (Website Tonight, Yahoo Business Hosting). What this means to you as a customer is that if you’re ever unhappy with them as your host (and you will be at some point as you grow and they make your growth difficult), and you decide that you’re going to move to another hosting company, it will make your life that much harder. Especially with Yahoo, as they even require that your website be built using their proprietary protocal (dubbed “RTML”), which is basically a highly arbitrary an customized version of the internet standard HTML programming language. This makes it almost impossible to migrate your website to another hosting company. The internet by nature is open. You should ensure that your website control panel, and language it’s developed in are the same. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you will get STUCK with your hosting provider if you get tired of them. Go with standard control panel solutions (cPanel, Plesk, H-Sphere as these will make it much easier to migrate your site to another host as most respected hosting providers typically use one of these control panel platforms), and go with standard non-proprietary systems (i.e. servers that run HTML, and PHP). I’ve had clients that originally setup with Yahoo only to find out that they have build their website *completely* from scratch all over again, because Yahoo’s platform is proprietary and they can’t migrate their website to another hosting company. Avoid the trouble of putting yourself through this.
VPS and Dedicated Providers I Recommend:
HiVelocity (this is who I host my dedicated servers with)
My Opinion on HiVelocity: Well, if you call HiVelocity on the phone, you’ll find that most of them know me by name. The company is small, and they have had their fair share of growing pains, but overall, they are a good company, and my uptime reflects it. This blog you’re reading right now is on my server hosted with HiVelocity.
Here’s my uptime for the last 5 years:
http://www.siteuptime.com/prem_statistics.php?Id=2869&UserId=74242
ThePlanet.com/SoftLayer.com
Reviews on ThePlanet/SoftLayer
My Opinion on ThePlanet/SL: I think they’re a pretty good hosting company. I currently manage 7 different servers for clients who have their dedicated server with ThePlanet and I have had to work with their technical support staff on different occasions for different reasons, and every time they never missed a beat and were more than willing to help. One guy from their tech support staff even called me when we had both established it was a problem we could fix faster if we spoke on the phone briefly for a few minutes instead of e-mailing each other back and forth! That’s what I call customer service.
LiquidWeb.com
My Opinion on LiquidWeb: I currently manage 3 servers for clients who host their dedicated servers with LiquidWeb, and I can say their tech support has always been pleasant, and the uptime is outstanding.
