Your Online Presence > Hosting & Domain Names

Choosing a website host

By Lasa Information Systems Team

Once you've developed a website, you'll need someone to "host" it - that is, to let you store it on a computer that is permanently connected to the Internet so that other people can see it. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can host your site, as well as providing net access and email, and this may be the best solution for beginners with a simple site. But there are many alternatives - and so many companies offer web hosting that it can be difficult to decide which package suits your organisation's needs.

Main Points to Consider

When choosing a hosting company, you need to consider the following issues:

Cost

This can range from free upwards, but can generally be divided into 3 broad categories - free, budget, and professional. For more on these categories, see below.

The amount of web space you get

This can be anything from 5Mb to over 100Mb. 5Mb is usually enough for a small, simple site with not too many graphics - however, even if your site is quite small now, you'll need to make allowances for the site to expand.

Domain Names

A domain name means you have your own online name - www.youragency.org.uk, with email addresses like name@youragency.org.uk. Hosting companies may offer free or cheap domain names as part of the package. If so, check the terms and conditions to make sure that you own the domain name. You may also be charged a fee if you decide to move your domain name to a different web host in future. This is often the catch at the free or budget end of the web hosting market.

Technical support

Free or budget hosting packages might only provide technical support via email. If you are happy with this minimal level of support, fine - if you would rather speak to a person, make sure the package you opt for includes telephone support. Even if you're happy with a minimal level of support, you will want to be sure that you'll get a response to your emails within a time you consider reasonable. It's worth emailing technical support before you sign up to see if they give you a satisfactory response within the timescale you need.

Email and web forwarding

If you've already built your site and are using the free web space provided by your ISP you can have your emails and domain name redirected to your free web space. Make sure your chosen hosting company offers this.

POP 3 email

Most hosting companies also offer a number of "POP 3 email accounts" with your web space. Each POP3 email box allows a separate user name and password for an individual mailbox at your domain e.g. info@youragency.org.uk or staffmembersname@youragency.org.uk etc. Email can then be distributed to each staff member's computer using software on your agency's server, or staff can use their individual user name and password to collect their mail. The greater the number of POP 3 accounts on offer, the more individual mailboxes you can have.

Bandwidth

Each time someone visits your site they are downloading files such as web pages and graphics. The more visitors your site gets, and the bigger the files are, the more bandwidth will be used. Professional hosting companies generally offer 1-3Gb of monthly bandwidth as standard. A small site with just a few simple pages and 50 visitors per day could use around 150Mb of bandwidth a month. On the other hand a large site with lots of graphics, multimedia files and a popular discussion board could use 10Gb or more a month. Many hosting companies will "switch off" access to your site without notice and/or impose hefty charges if you exceed your monthly bandwidth allowance - make sure your package includes enough bandwidth to suit your needs and that you can easily upgrade to a more suitable package if you need to.

Support for facilities such as databases, scripts and Microsoft FrontPage extensions

If your site uses a database or customised scripts (e.g. for discussion boards), or Microsoft FrontPage extensions, you will need to make sure your chosen host supports these features.

Online management

This allows you to access your domain names, web and email forwarding options, so you can change passwords and email configurations, alter forwarding settings and other features easily.

Security

If you are intending to conduct any sort of commercial activity from your site you may need a "secure server" to protect the personal information of visitors to your site. If you need to collect money online make sure your hosting company offers secure server access. You can also pay for third party services such as those offered by Poptel, Just Giving, NetBanx or Worldpay.

Service Level Agreements

These agreements (sometimes referred to as an SLA) set out things like speed of service, technical support response times, backup arrangements, server availability (which will affect how often or not your website is available to the big wide world), and compensation arrangements if the hosting company does not live up to its promises. If you need the peace of mind that SLAs can offer make sure you get a written agreement that suits your needs. It's worth noting that not all web hosts will keep a back up of your website (particularly not those at the free or budget end of the market). Even if a web host says that they will do regular backups, we would recommend that you also regularly back up your site. A service level agreement won't be much use if your web host goes out of business for example - can you afford to lose all the data on your site?

Free Hosting

There are lots of free hosting companies that just offer free web space (i.e. without providing an Internet connection). Either way there are likely to be restrictive terms and conditions. Free hosts might put banner advertisements all over your site, you're likely to get a really long web address such as www.youragency.yourisporfreewebhostname.members.com and you're unlikely to get support for features such as databases and scripts (although there are some specialist free hosts that do support these features) or a service level agreement. Your free host probably won't back up your site and you can't be sure that your site won't just disappear overnight. You may also find that the company's servers are slow or that they are often down, making your site slow or frequently unavailable. Apart from the free space offered by your ISP, many free web hosts are based abroad and this can make resolving any problems more difficult or costly.

Having said this, free hosting can be worth considering provided you bear in mind their limitations. You could always register a domain name and arrange email and web forwarding to your free space. If you are a very small agency who just wants a web presence, perhaps to advertise your existence and opening times etc. a free host could be all you need … for now … But if you are dependent on your website to communicate information or deliver services, then you probably won't want to trust it to a free web host!

Budget hosting

If you're on a tight budget but want a bit more than the free hosting companies can offer, there are many budget hosts that provide services that may suit your needs. Budget web hosting for a basic site starts at around £10 per year up to around £60 per year. You should be able to find a host in this category that supports facilities such as databases, scripts and FrontPage extensions - some may even provide service level agreements though provision for any of these features is less likely at the lower end of the price range. Make sure you're clear about what you will be getting for your money.

Professional hosting

Professional hosting packages generally come in two flavours - shared server and dedicated server.

With a shared hosting solution, your website shares a server with several others. Shared hosting is a relatively economical option for organisations which need more functionality than can be provided by a budget host, but don't need to have their site hosted on its own server. Prices start at around £150 - £200 per year upwards and the hosting company will take charge of most of the technical issues.

A disadvantage is that limits must be placed on what each site can do in order to prevent disruption to other sites on the same server. For example you should all get access to standard scripts provided by the host (for things like guest books and hit counters) but you probably won't be able to use more advanced or customised scripts. There will also be restrictions on the maximum amount of bandwidth you can have and what sort of commercial activity you can carry out.

If your website is critical to your service delivery or business, or you need your site to be available 100% of the time, or your site gets very busy (monthly bandwidth of more than about 10Gb), then you'll need to consider a dedicated hosting solution. Lasa's rightsnet site for example, recently moved from a shared server to its own server because the site ran too slowly on a shared server. Dedicated hosting packages start from around £1000 a year upwards and for this you can expect to get your own server tailored to meet your needs, managed by skilled staff in a purpose built data centre, your own bandwidth connection and a service level agreement. With a dedicated hosting package you have full control so you'll need to have access to someone with appropriate skills.

What's the best package for you?

This will obviously depend on what you want to use your website for. However before signing up to a package:

• Be clear about your requirements and make sure your chosen host can fulfil them (e.g. amount of web space, bandwidth, number of email boxes, databases, backup arrangements etc).
• Check websites that are similar to yours and get recommendations if you can
• Last but not least - make sure you read the hosting company's terms and conditions.

Treat with caution:

• Offers that seem too good to be true (e.g. unlimited bandwidth or web space at rock bottom prices)
• Excessive fees for exceeding your bandwidth
• Companies that don't publish their contact details (including street address, phone number) on their website
• Companies that respond slowly to technical support queries or sales enquiries.

You can compare prices and products at UK Top Hosts. For more information on choosing a website host see also .net Magazine's guide to hosting.