Choosing a Web Host

SEO

Search Engine Optimization

The Web host is the server that puts your Web site on the Internet and stores the files. You can always start your own server, but you would need to invest in a lot of hardware - including redundancy units to make sure your site is up all the time.

Choosing a hosting service

A good hosting service should come with:

- Fast loading time - check sites that are hosted by this service

- Reliable Service - Make sure the hosting service isn't going to be "down" for long periods.

- Recommendations from other users.

- Reasonable technical support.

- A good statistics program like Urchin - so you can see what pages are getting visitors and get a realistic assessment of number of visitors.

- Reasonable bandwidth and storage capacity

- Support for any special services or applications you may need - secure checkout, easily installable scripts scripts, MySQL or special data bases.

- A reliable domain registrar and hosting service that will not arbitrarily block your domain or prevent transfer of your domain - this does happen (see Guarding against lapsed domains and lost sites )

Bandwidth and storage limitations - Bandwidth is how much material can be downloaded from your site by users in a month.

Be careful!. Some "inexpensive" Web hosting services have unrealistically low limitations. When you exceed those limitations, they slap a large surcharge free on you.

Some offer huge amounts of space you don't need - at inflated prices. Some offer "unlimited" storage and bandwidth. Of course it is not really unlimited, since at some point you might use the entire disk or the entire bandwidth capacity of the server.

Initially, you aren't going to need more than 1 GB (gigabyte) of storage space and 10 GB of bandwidth unless you are going to allow people to download very large text files (like an entire online book at once) or have streaming video at your site.

UNIX versus ASP - A Web server runs two major types of software. The first is the operating system, which is either some variety of Unix or Microsoft Windows NT, 2000  or Vista or a successor. That takes care of basic things like keeping the files and directories in order. The second layer is the software that interprets and generates the Web pages and communicates with the world Wide Web. That is usually a system like Apache for Unix Web hosts or IIS for Microsoft Web hosts, that usually host asp pages. Unix servers can also host asp pages. IIS allows programmers to do a lot of things simply in Basic and is therefore used in many closed enterprise Web sites. 

My experience is that servers running Unix and the Apache operating system are more reliable and trouble free than IIS servers that run asp - type pages in Microsoft Windows servers. That may just be my experience though. Front Page (Microsoft's design tool) offers various special extensions and gadgets, but these can be supported on Unix based servers. Unix abounds in free applications as well.

SEO

SEO Basics