In today’s market, a business of any size needs a website. Often, it is cheaper to outsource the hosting of that website to a third party rather than trying to do it in house. However, when determining the best hosting solution, price should not be the main factor because businesses have different needs which require different hosting solutions. The best option for you depends on the functionality that your site requires both now and in the future. Here is some information that will help you determine which solution is best for your organization, as well as things to keep in mind as your site evolves.

Before selecting a web hosting package, you must first identify what you need your website to do. The purpose of any website is to incentivize the reader to take some course of action. What course of action do you want them to take? What message do you wish to send? How are you going to send that message? The answers to these questions determine the amount of bandwidth you need, the website availability you require, and the peripheral services you must include (such as video hosting services). Once you know these things, you can then make an educated decision on what web hosting package to purchase.

Types of Web Hosting
Free Hosting has its limits. It is free because the host makes money in some other way—usually by filling your site with exterior advertisements or pushing you to buy more services. You are unlikely to look very legitimate to your customers under a free plan. Additionally, free plans seldom provide enough resources to handle more than a few visitors at a time. Personal blogs often utilize this if they have a small audience and publish occasionally.

Shared Hosting is the most common and cost-effective means to get your website up and running. Shared hosting plans can cost less than $10 per month for enough space and bandwidth to put up a modest eCommerce or informational site. In a shared plan, your site shares space with other websites on the same server. Because of the number of connections to the web each server has, your site can still be accessed by many users simultaneously even though other users are accessing other sites on the same server. Many small eCommerce sites and blogs  utilize shared hosting because its affordable and easy to manage.

Dedicated Hosting enables customers to utilize an entire server without competing for resources. Most web hosts will give you an option between managed and unmanaged dedicated hosting. In unmanaged hosting, you are granted root access to the server and are expected to maintain it yourself. This gives you more control over the server but requires more in-house expertise. In managed hosting, the host retains similar control over the server that they would have under shared hosting. While you will pay more for managed hosting, you will enjoy the benefits of not having to worry about standard server maintenance. Dedicated hosting—whether managed or not—is best when your site experiences a lot of traffic. Large eCommerce sites, high-volume informational sites, or small data streaming sites will all require a dedicated servers for optimal performance.

Cloud Hosting provides many of the same benefits and resources of dedicated hosting without a single point of failure since your site is not relying upon one server. This method is similar to diversifying your stock portfolio. If one of the servers has a problem, your site is still operative. This feature is known as failover or cloud hosting redundancy. Cloud hosting protects you and keeps your costs low ($50 per month, for example). Cloud hosting relies on virtual server technology that can access the resources of multiple servers. Each virtual server is designed to meet the needs of your website. Because of this, cloud hosting gives you more resources and flexibility than are possible with shared hosting. Large eCommerce sites, high-volume informational sites, and data streaming sites are all possible with cloud hosting. In fact, cloud hosted sites are often preferred over dedicated hosting because of the flexibility and fail over capabilities.

The term co-location in web hosting refers to a fully managed datacenter where businesses that own their own hardware can store it. Co-located servers are completely unmanaged by the web host. All the web host provides is security, alternate power sources, and climate control. All other server maintenance is carried out by the company that owns the co-located servers.

Features of Hosting Services
Many web hosts price individual features independently of the type of web hosting the client chooses. For example, they may have one price for “standard content” (text and some images) and a higher price for streaming content (files, videos, and other media). This is because of the bandwidth required to handle the demand. Sites that offer media streaming tend to be more popular and attract more users, and naturally it takes a lot more bandwidth per user to stream media than simply text and images.

Let us go over the various features you may want in your website and discuss how each will affect your experience with your web host.

eCommerce hosting is the typical hosting type most businesses choose because they usually want to sell products on their website. eCommerce sites are actually not much more demanding on servers than traditional informational sites. eCommerce sites require shopping carts and merchant accounts, which do not require much additional bandwidth but do require extra setup between the client and financial institutions. Any extra charge from the web host would come for additional security at the client’s request.

Email hosting provides you with your own email domain and links it with your website. A good email host will provide spam and virus protection against incoming servers. Different types of email hosting exist—the basic type, POP3, will download messages to Outlook, Thunderbird, or other email clients. More advanced services like IMAP or Microsoft Exchange will keep copies of emails on the server, and they will sync email folders between multiple computers (or mobile devices) and the server. Private email domains driven by Gmail are also available.

Blog hosting is actually called “web log” hosting. A true blog (or web log) will support authoring, editing, and syndication of posts. It will also include features for moderation and image management. This enables you to publish posts and let others comment on them, put up images, block users who trash your blog with nasty comments, and let users link your blog to their RSS feeds (such as Google Reader). These are features that differentiate a personal blog from a more professional “web log.” Generally, a good web host will provide these features at no additional cost.

Image hosting refers to sites where users can upload and download photos. In a simple example, a professional photographer uploads photos to the site for a given number of days, and clients can purchase and download photos from the site. In a more complex example, a social networking site allows many people to upload and download images at will. These services require much more bandwidth than the typical informational or eCommerce site.

Video and music hosting requires a lot of space and bandwidth (and if you plan on becoming a world-renowned site like YouTube or Napster, you will need an enormous amount of it). Large amounts of video or music streaming will probably mean large costs as well, especially when your site allows people to both upload and download media. If you want a simple “by family, for family” website to post home videos, you may be able to get by on a shared hosting plan with its space and bandwidth limits. If your target audience is any bigger than that, however, you’ll need cloud or dedicated hosting to get the availability you want.

Finding the Right Host
Once you know what features you need for your website and have determined what type of web hosting you want, it is time to find the right company to provide that hosting. A good web hosting company will:

• Guarantee that their servers are up 99% of the time
• Guard servers against physical access by any intruders
• Not add advertisements to your site or sell your information to third parties
• Provide support and consult with you about your needs at no extra cost

Once you have chosen the right web host and hosting plan for your site, you can focus on your business and simply let your website work for you.

The PHP contest has officially closed and the winners have received their prizes; if you didn’t win or are just finding out the contest happened there is still great content and code created to view and use for inspiration on your own PHP projects.

We loved contributing to the greater good of the PHP Web hosting and general PHP community through the contest while interacting with the participants. We recently conducted an interview with the overall winner, Mark Willis, and will be posting good insights from our other winners in the coming posts. Enjoy.

Read below or listed to the actual interview

WH – What does your PHP code snippet do?

• MW – What is does is take a set of either CSS or java script files, combines them into one file and then compresses it though Yahoo/Java compression software. It’s quite a large improvement for file size and for page loads.

WH – Do you use it yourself? How did you come up with it?

• MW – I use it on a couple client sites that I run. I came up with the idea of it mainly because I built a couple of pages that used 10-15 sub-style sheets and another 5-10 java script files. What I was finding was the page load was quite long, where its pulling all the files in a couple at a time, so I worked the program to put them all together making it a lot quicker and improving the page load speed.

WH – What was your inspiration for creating it?

• MW – The problem I was having was the pages and sites I was working on were just taking too long to load especially on busy broadband / dial up connections. It was 20-30 seconds to load a page. As soon as I built this script to remove those two problems of having too many files, the page load time decreased dramatically.

WH – Good timing in lieu of Google changing a few things and taking into considering page load time, we’ve been thinking about that a lot.

• MW – Yeah it’s an interesting thing. Google kind of controls a lot at the moment, especially with the Panda update that they did, it does kind of force people to keep on top of things. This is just a simple improvement we can make.

WH – Tell us about something exciting you’ve been working on lately.

• MW – Through work I generally do jQuery plugin type stuff and JavaScript front end. But mainly I do databases and all the back end stuff, data manipulation, coding things like that.
  
  Out of work I’ve got an open source project that I’m doing at the moment for an online storage company. I’m also studying for university so it does not leave too much time to do other things.

  I am actually studying computer and maths sciences which is taking up all my spare time. I left high schools with a couple of A levels and went straight into work so I thought it would be efficient to get a degree in what I do.

WH – How did you start programming? What was the deciding factor for choosing PHP as a programming language?

• MW – I actually started when I was in high school. I did an IT course and one of my projects was to build a website which I built with PHP; and that’s when I started learning PHP. I actually sold it to the school after it was finished.

WH – What was the site?

• MW – It was a calendar system that they used in-house. Which is quite good because I was only 17 at the time.

WH – That’s pretty good to make money on your first project.

• MW – Yeah, I didn’t moan.

WH – How did you decide to use PHP at that time? Was it just the most fitting for the functionality you were looking for?

• MW – That was the one at the time really; my teacher showed and guided me into it. I’ve played with ASP and a couple of other languages on that level. PHP seems to be the most diverse because it’s built by an open source community; you constantly get updates and have a world of support.

WH – What advice do you have for someone just starting programming, advice you could have used when you were building your calendaring system in high school?

• MW – I probably say, now-a-days, to “Google it” that would be the best one. Looking at what other people release and reading what other people have written. I’ve got a stack of books for PHP and MySQL that I’ve read a couple times. What other people write and have coded can definitely help and teach you a way and process of doing things.

WH – That was one of the things we liked about the PHP contest, it is a way for developers like yourself to share code; of course we’ve leaving it there for future reference. It’s been interesting to see the discussion after the contest ended with different snippets of code as well as the traffic we’re getting to the site from it. Very good advice to Google it and see what other people have done.

WH – What’s one thing every website owner should know?

• MW – If you’re building your own site, or building other peoples sites, it’s always useful to know as much as you can about what you’ve written. Or if you’re using a CMS for example, like Drupal or Joomla, to know as much as you can about how it works and the admin sections.
  
  I’ve worked on a Drupal site recently which had quite bad page load and after going through the code and understand how it works we’ve managed to increase the speed quite a lot doing simple things. So in that sense it’s quite good to know what you’re doing.

  If you’re a developer making a site for a client then all you need to know is their mobile number.

Who inspires you and why?

• MW – I’ve thought about this for a while trying to think of who. The one place I seem to spend most of my time when I’m not studying, working or looking after the kids and everything else is on the Facebook engineering site. They release updates for MySQL and PHP and what they’re giving back to the open source community. They release things every couple of weeks, stuff that they build in house and then they release back to the Open Community and MySQL. Things like Hip Hop for PHP which converts PHP code into C++. It’s such a simple idea but when you get a 50% increase in speed it makes sense to do it. That’s the kind of place where I look for ideas.

*If you’d like to download Mark’s PHP code visit his site at http://mwillis.co.uk/projects/minify-compress-css-and-js/

As a promoter and leader of the PHP Web hosting circle we decided to have a little fun in the community by announcing the start of our PHP code contest. If you know anything about PHP you’ll want to participate! We’ll be hooking up winners, mainly selected by vote from peers, with books and shirts from PHP Architect, software from Zend, or a System76 laptop pre-installed with Ubuntu; yep, we’re geekin’ out.

The contest is a way for you to share code you’ve developed with the greater community, be recognized for your efforts, and win prizes that relate to your favorite coding language.

We love the huge following and great strength in the community of independent developers who use and enjoy PHP. We recognize the time, effort, and commitment developers put into honing their craft, and the overall impression their work has made on the web… we tip our hats!

You only have until March 15th to submit your PHP code and get your network to vote so…

Ready. Set. Go! http://www.westhost.com/contest/php/

It’s here, the biggest shopping day of the year, Black Friday. Equally as important for us is the largest e-commerce day of the year, Cyber Monday; the Monday following Thanksgiving. We’ve decided to join in the Black Friday deals this year by providing some huge deals for all our hosting products. We normally don’t leak our promotions before they go live but… this time I was just too excited so feel free to spread the news!

Beginning on Wednesday, Nov. 24th we will double your term for free. Any product, any term, no extra cost. If you buy 1 year of hosting, we’ll give you a year for free, buy 2 years get 2 years free.

Double your term also applies to our dedicated servers which are currently on sale. Are we still discounting the servers during the Black Friday & Cyber Monday sales you ask? Yes, we are combining November Rush AND Black Friday to make the perfect deal! I can honestly tell you it won’t get better than this.

Spread the news, share the love, your network is going to go wild over the deals your getting this weekend at WestHost.

Thanks to our team (and the ladies and gents at Ksplice) we’ve deployed Ksplice on our shared hosting servers and will include it for free on our new line of dedicated servers coming later this week!

What is Ksplice?
Ksplice gives us the ability to apply important kernel security updates released by CentOS/Red Hat Linux without having to reboot the server.

What’s the big deal?
Ksplice provides increased server up-time and faster security updates. The speed of deployment for security patches is much more efficient since we don’t have to reboot the server.

One of our systems administrators, Cameron Christensen said, “Ksplice has the obvious benefits of increased uptime but it also means that our team of Sys. Admins can spend more time focused on monitoring and optimizing these servers for our clients.”

We understand how critical up-time is to you and we are very excited to bring you this added benefit.

As many of you know, beginning January 12th, a chain of earthquakes devastated Haiti leaving its people in a famine of essential supplies and support personnel to assist.

Although normally fiercely competitive, WestHost has joined VPS.NET, midPhase, HostGator, SingleHop, Laughing Squid, HostDime, iWeb, Site5, SoftLayer, Blue Box Group, Webair, and more in a community effort to exercise power as a group and achieve much more than we can alone.

Hosting for Haiti has partnered with the American Red Cross to provide support, which may include mobilizing relief workers, sending relief supplies, and providing financial resources for recovery.

We hope to make a difference. And you can too. Ten dollars helps. One hundred dollars helps ten times more.

PLEASE VISIT: HostingforHaiti.com and join us!



3 Ways to Help

Donate to the International Response Fund.100% of the funds will go to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development fund.

Copy this URL (http://www.hostingforhaiti.com) and place it on your blog or anywhere else you think it will be viewed.

Tweet about this!Use the hash-tag #hostingforhaiti and spread the word!

To that end I pose this question, “If a Web site goes down and no one tries to view it, is it really down?”

To help answer this question, Netcraft, a non-affiliated Internet hosting research firm, uses a similar model in determining the most reliable Web hosting companies. “From a customer’s point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies’ own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing,” Netcraft stated. “This is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage.”

WestHost is proud to be recognized by Netcraft as one of the top three most reliable web hosting companies in the world. Providing constant uptime and responsive support is our aim. Basically, we hear everything, even when no one else does.

If a Web site goes down and no one tries to view it, is it really down?

What do you think?

We would like to congratulate Lance for his outstanding contributions in client service excellence! Lance has not only been a valuable asset to our Sales team but he has also been instrumental in maintaining some of our social media campaigns. Clients who have had the pleasure of working with Lance have commended him on his ability to listen carefully and take decisive action in resolving their needs quickly. Lance has an easy-going demeanor and contributes to a positive work environment for everyone. We appreciate his hard work and focus in helping clients to achieve their business goals.

We started off the evening grilling hamburgers and hot dogs. There’s nothing quite like hamburgers hot off the grill on a beautiful summer evening. After socializing for a bit, we had some raffle drawings. I was lucky enough to win a cooler filled with candy.

Morgan (one of our Systems Administrators) won the ultimate prize of having the water from the cooler dumped out on him. Summer evenings in Cache Valley are about as nice as it gets. Although I love the fall, I’ll sure miss some things about summer.

The party was a great chance for us to relax a little bit and get to know each other better. While we do communicate around the office, it’s often nice to be able to have a conversation with another employee without using the words “Web hosting” or “domain registration” in a sentence.

So long Summer. Till next year.

A few of us attended this years HostingCon in Washington DC. HostingCon is an annual event that gathers Web hosting professionals from around the world. During this three day convention, participants network with hosted services professionals to gain greater knowledge and learn of new resources within the industry that can help improve the services they offer their clients. It was an excellent convention and much was gained by our involvement. We were fortunate to have several representatives within UK2 Group attend this years event including staff from WestHost, Midphase, UK2.net and VPS.NET.

After the conference was completed, we were able to enjoy some of the sites around Washington DC. The monuments and museums within the National Mall are a powerful reminder of the sacrifices of many individuals throughout history who have helped to build and protect this great nation.