Locaweb Blog

So now you’ve selected the perfect domain name (see Part 1 of this tutorial), and you’re ready to move on to the next level. You want to see your website come to life, you want to share it with your friends and/or customers, you want to look it up on Google and see it in the search results, you want your e-mails to be sent from yourname@yourdomain.com.

For all of that to happen, you’ll have to do 2 main things: First, you’ll have to choose a web host (more on that in a second). Then, you’ll have to find someone to create the website for you. These professionals are called web developers or web designers. The correct usage of either term isn’t going to be discussed here – what matters is that you’ll find people to create your website describing them as either one of those terms. I’ll explain more about these professionals in a future article, but generally speaking, you should either learn to use a website creation tool or be prepared to pay someone to create a professional website for you.

Web hosts are companies that possess the infrastructure needed for a website to be accessible on the Internet. That includes servers (nothing more than computers, but with certain special features), a commercial, high speed connection between them and the Internet, and people to support those systems by monitoring them and fixing problems when things go wrong.

These companies will generally bundle quantities of resources into plans that you can pay for in order to use those resources and have your website available online, much like what you would with a mobile phone company, where you pay a monthly fee to be able to make and receive calls, send a certain amount of text messages, and so on.

Choosing a web host can be tricky for the unexperienced. The hosting market is full of companies, good and bad, paid and free, professional and amateur. We’ll try to quickly explain the main things to watch out for when choosing a hosting company.

First, always keep in mind the golden rule of business: If you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys. I didn’t make up that phrase, but I heard it from Marty Cagan, a very experienced product manager and consultant, and I believe he was quoting Sir James Michael “Jimmy” Goldsmith, and there is much wisdom in it. Companies that don’t deliver value try to compete in price, so you’ll find lots of cheap or even free hosting out there that will only cause you grief when you most need it. Many of them are reselling third-party hosting, and some of those third-party hosts aren’t themselves any good to begin with. Stay away from those.

*Disk space and bandwidth/data transfer*

It is very common for web hosts to try to compete in terms that are easily comparable such as disk space or bandwidth (which is the amount of data or information they allow you to transfer per month). These are important variables to consider, but nowadays the majority of hosting plans already includes an enormous amount of both, much more than any simple website needs. Many continue to have fixed amounts, however, in order to be able to compare themselves with the competition.

*Service Level Agreement or Uptime Guarantee*

This is one of the most important aspects of web hosting. The acronym “SLA” is very commonly used in this context. SLA is basically how much time, in percentile terms, the web host guarantees that the website will be available on the internet. Usually this will be anywhere between 95% and 99.9%, which translate into 36 hours (5%) and 43 minutes (0.1%) of downtime per month. You should try to find the host with the best possible SLA, but be wary of hosts that have very high SLAs but no clear policies backing their claims.

*E-mail*

To do business online, you’ll probably be using e-mail much more than the website itself. Make sure the web hosting plan contains enough mailboxes for your intended use (1 for sales, 1 for info, 1 for each of your employees, for example). Also, check if it gives you access to your e-mails via browser (called webmail) and via e-mail clients such as Outlook (this is sometimes referred to as “pop” or “IMAP”, which are the protocols or “computer languages” that the e-mail clients understand). Also, check the mailbox space limits, message size and attachment limits that the web host imposes on e-mail.

The SLAs described above exist for a reason. Like all things in life, technology isn’t perfect, and things may go wrong from time to time. Also, you might need help related to some aspect of your website. Having good, competent support is very important for a web host, and is one of the most important things for you to check. When is support available? What support channels are there? If there’s no phone support, do they answer quickly to e-mails? If there isn’t support 24×7, is there an emergency hotline from critical issues? Do you require support 24×7, realistically, or is having an emergency service enough outside of business hours?

Usually it is a good thing for the web host to have a good control panel where you can manage your accoun’s details. Also, a ticket system for tracking support requests is usually an interesting tool for the customer. If you intend to build your own website and have no technical knowledge, a web site builder tool, blogging tool or content management tool might come in handy. For technical needs there are many other tools that we might mention as good to have, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.

When you go to a web hosts web page you will probably find lots of information on what langagues they support, operating system, databases, SSL certificates for secure transactions, etc. Unless you are a programmer and are going to make the website yourself, ask whoever is going to do it if they have any special requirements, and check whether the web host has those available.

Usually bad companies go under fast, or don’t ever get very many customers. Check if the company you’re signing up for has been around for a while, how many customers it has, where it’s located and how transparent it is with its corporate information. Usually, the longer its been around, the more customers it has, and the more open it is, the better.

So in the end, choose a web host that has a certain tradition, has a good SLA, good support and good e-mail.

Basically, that’s it for now. In a future article I’ll explain how to choose a web developer, and how to try to make your own website.