Foreign Perspectives

You’d think that choosing a new hosting service for your sites would be a fairly easy affair but the choice available these days makes it something of a chore.

In fact, there are two separate things that you’re doing which complicates life a little more. First of all you need somewhere to register your domain name and secondly you need somewhere to hold the website for that domain.

Many people go with the same place to do both but that’s a big mistake. Certainly you can often get offers of a free domain with some hosting but in reality it’s only saving you $10 or so per year. If you’ve several domains then you need to look at the costs involved in registering the others with your hosting service and in some cases that’s substantially more than the $10 that you actually need to pay. However, that’s not the biggest problem: if you fall out with your hosting service you can find that they make it very difficult to move to a new one whereas if the domain is registered elsewhere you just switch the name servers and you’re out.

Step two is selecting somewhere to store your new website and that’s where you need to think about what you actually need. For example, when I ran the little selection over at Web Hosting Choice with my basic requirements (under $10/month, 1GB webspace, 20GB/month bandwidth, cpanel) it threw up 84 options. Now, it is possible to lower the numbers somewhat to 11 if you add in that you want a rating above 7 but the problem with that is that obviously not everyone rates their hosting on that site and therefore the overall rating figures aren’t overlly dependable. Certainly you’d not want to be choosing a place with a rating of 1 or 2 but you can’t really thin out the numbers much beyond that. Also worth watching is that the hosting services regularly increase the facilities that you get in a package so when I searched for our current host it didn’t come up at all because it’s listed as providing 500MB storage whereas it actually provides 10 times that now.

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