Choosing a Web Host: Deciphering the Marketing Babble and Finding a Good Host
June 6th, 2007 
Rosetta Stone, Photograph by Dave Shea
Web hosts are a dime a dozen (or million). There are good ones, and there are many, many bad ones. Problem is, how do you figure out the difference? Search for “Web Host” (go ahead–I’ll wait…) and you’ll find more search results than you would ever want to click through. Visit any one of those and you’ll encounter a slew of foreign terms: uptime, bandwidth, reseller, control panel… the list could go on and on, especially if you’re not the most tech-savvy surfer on the block.
A Rosetta Stone for the web hosting “Tower of Babble”
The jargon can be confusing to anyone new to purchasing a hosting account, so here’s a bit of a primer for you on some of the more common terms used in each hosting package.
- Server
- Starting with the most basic definition, a server is a computer that serves web pages to the users that request them. When you double click on a file on your computer, the computer (hopefully) knows what program to use, how the file should look, and the computer opens the file, as you requested. A server does the same thing, but with websites.When you type in a web address, you’re giving your browser the address of a group of files on a specific computer. That computer may be in Singapore, or it may be in Bangor, Maine. Regardless of the computer’s physical location, if it’s configured to serve web pages, it will respond to your browser’s request by showing you the website you asked for.Running a server takes a bit of work. You have to make sure that it’s running, you have to install the right applications and programming languages on it, and you have to make sure that it’s secure (this means that hackers and crackers will have a difficult to impossible time getting into the server to peruse your files or do mischief). I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to do that work myself. I pay a hosting company my hard-earned money to take care of that job for me — this means that I have more time to do the things that I want to do, and for me the payoff is pretty reasonable.
- Reseller
- Resellers do exactly what their name implies: they buy hosting from a different company and re-sell the hosting for a profit. This isn’t always a bad thing, but make sure that the host is reputable by doing a few searches on the company name. I’ve found Google Blogsearch to be a pretty good source of both positive and negative reviews on hosting. Just type in the company name with a few variants: try “Insert Company Name Here Rocks” or “Insert Company Name Here Horrible” for starters. You should get a pretty candid view of the company’s service record from a customer’s point of view.
- Shared Hosting/Dedicated Hosting
- Shared hosting is when several different hosting accounts are all housed on the same server. Shared hosting is usally cheaper than the alternative: dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting means that your hosting account is the only one on that specific server.What’s the difference? Think about your home computer. If it’s a family computer with a user account for each family member, each one of those accounts share the computer’s hard drive space. This means that everybody can use the same computer, but if one person hogs all of the hard drive space for computer games or downloads of the latest and greatest single from Justin Timberlake, the whole family has to put up with the lack of space. However, just like you would probably set limits on the amount of space-hogging done on your family computer, most hosting companies put limits on how much server space any one client can use. This cuts down on the space crisis and makes everyone a little happier (except for that one person who needs Space Invaders One through Ten all on the same hard drive).Dedicated hosting means that you have your very own server to host your website — this is usually much more expensive than a shared account. To use the same analogy, dedicated hosting is like having a computer for each family member. Now, if all your family does is use the computer for homework, games and surfing the ‘Net, it may be a tad excessive to keep separate computers for Mom, Dad, Jill, Johnnie and Jane. Although, if Mom’s working on her doctorate and writing a thesis, Dad’s doing the family budgets and working from home, Jill’s working on college application letters and a senior thesis to complete high school, Johnnie’s learning some programming languages and Janie’s all into digital photography, the separate computer plan makes more sense. The same goes with dedicated hosting. If you’ve got three different ecommerce sites, two weblogs, and a family message forum, you may want to look into a dedicated hosting account to handle some of the strain you’d be putting on a shared hosting account.
- Uptime
The time during which a device, such as a computer, is functioning or available for use.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English LanguageUptime is the actual amount of time the server is running. This means that people can browse your website, you can receive email if mail is part of your hosting plan, and all the services the hosting company promises are available.The opposite of uptime is downtime, which is when the server is not available. When you pay for hosting, you’re paying for uptime, so be very careful about those uptime guarantees–they’re not always the most accurate picture of the company’s service quality.- Bandwidth (or Data Transfer Rate)
- Bandwidth, or Data Transfer Rate are terms you’ll see on the hosting plan features pages. They both mean the same thing when it comes to web hosting: the amount of information visitors download from your website during a given period (usually a month). The more visitors you have to your site, the more bandwidth your site will use.If you are purchasing a hosting plan for a personal site, like a family web page, chances are that you don’t need to worry very much about bandwidth. If you’re planning on becoming the next amazon.com or ebay, you may want to look at plans that have a higher bandwidth/transfer rate per month. If you exceed your monthly limits, you can expect one of two things (or maybe both): your site may be temporarily disabled or you could face overage charges for the amount of bandwidth/transfer rate exceeding the limit.
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