When producing your webproject, one thing alot of people miss or don´t put enough time on is choosing the right hosting. There are basically three different options for good and affordable hosting, shared hosting, vps and co-location. I will try to write some good advice on all of these, starting with the shared hosting.

First thing you may want to look at is where the server is located, it´s been dabbled in and out about the weight of having a server in the same country as you will conduct business, and ofcourse the name of your tld. Com url should be hosted in the US and english .co.uk should go to England. Why you might ask? Well even though nothing is hundred percent sure, just something so small as when doing a local google search and sorting per country will show you that often the right tld will show first, so why not give you that extra peek?

Second on the list - check the spec!

Are you running php or asp? What version of mysql do you want? Can the hosting offer custom installations or do they have a good package from the start? Price is _not_ everything and one often overlooks some vital stuff just to save a buck or two, but it´s very often not worth it. From my point of view, a good solid and up to date phpserver with good adminpanels is the way to go.

How about space and traffic?

If you are aiming at the US market or maybe even Europe you´ll have a buttload of different hostingcompanies to choose from, but beware of the false campaigns that offer you *free bandwidth and traffic - it´s just not happening. Very often when a site reaches large traffic they will (in best case) contact you and ask you to either pay more or find another hosting… In the worst cases some companies will simply unplug your page and not put it up again until the traffic has gone down - stay away from these crap companies!

Uptime is ofcourse very, very important, if not the most important part of good hosting? But sadly, this is nothing that can be guaranteed, swure one can use one of the multiple up-time-pages that are available where you can see when a hostingcompany has downtime, but if you are not rocking a redundanceserver on a different net your still gonna be suffering from running a offline page when the hosting goes down. And sadly backup servers tends to be pricey atleast if you are new and a fresh page.

I would recomend all european webmasters to use Servage.net as they are someones I have been very impressed with and they do offer alot of stuff for our greedy little hands!

250 GB hostingspace and 2100GB transfer is sure to help you out in the start before you move up to VPS, Co-Location or even your own machine.

If you want to sign up for Servage.net you are free to use this bonuscode for some extra juice in your account, ofcourse you are free to do whatever you want! Bonuscode: darklittlesecret

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 11:07 am and is filed under Internet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.