How to Choose a Web Host

How to Choose a Web Host

by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com

What are some of the things you should look for when choosing a web host? The criteria for choosing a free web host and a commercial web hosting solution are slightly different although they do overlap. Since thesitewizard.com caters to people who might be looking for either of these types of hosting, I will deal with each of these in turn. If you are only interested in one of these types, you can simply skip to the appropriate section. I have written these sections to be as independant of the other as possible.

Choosing a Free Web Host

Advertising

Most free web hosts impose advertising on your website. This is done to cover the costs of providing your site the free web space and associated services. Some hosts require you to place a banner on your pages, others display a window that pops up everytime a page on your site loads, while still others impose an advertising frame on your site. There is really no hard and fast rule which is to be preferred: some people hate a pop-up window, other webmasters dislike having to stuff banner codes onto their pages, and many people cannot stand an advertising frame (which may cause problems when you submit your website to search engines). Whichever method is used, check that you're comfortable with the method.

Note that free web hosts without forced advertisements aren't necessarily good news. Without a viable means to recover the costs of running their server, many of them close with alarming frequency.

Amount of web space

Does it have enough space for your needs? If you envisage that you will expand your site eventually, you might want to cater for future expansion. Most sites use less than 5MB of web space. Indeed, at one time, one of my other web sites, thefreecountry.com, used less than 5MB of space although it had about 150 pages on the site. Your needs will vary, depending on how many pictures your pages use, whether you need sound files, video clips, etc.

FTP access

(In case you're wondering: What is FTP?)

Some free hosting providers only allow you to design your page with their online builder. While this is useful for beginners, do you have the option to expand later when you become experienced and their online page builder does not have the facility you need? FTP access, or at the very least, the ability to upload your pages by email or browser, is needed. Personally, I feel FTP access is mandatory, except for the most trivial site.

File type and size limitations

Watch out for these. Some free hosts impose a maximum size on each of the files you upload (including one with a low of 200KB). Other sites restrict the file types you can upload to HTML and GIF/JPG files. If your needs are different, eg, if you want to distribute your own programs on your pages, you will have to look elsewhere.

Reliability and speed of access

This is extremely important. A site that is frequently down will lose a lot of visitors. If someone finds your site on the search engine, and he tries to access it but find that it is down, he'll simply go down the list to find another site. Slow access is also very frustrating for visitors (and for you too, when you upload your site). How do you know if a host is reliable or fast? If you can't get feedback from anyone, one way is to try it out yourself over a period of time, both during peak as well as non-peak hours. After all, it is free, so you can always experiment with it.

Perl and PHP

(In case you're wondering: What is PHP and Perl?)

This is not particularly crucial nowadays for a free web host, since there are so many free script hosting services available that provide counters, search engines, forms, polls, mailing lists, etc, without requiring you to dabble with Perl or PHP scripts.

However if you really want to do it yourself, with the minimum of advertising banners from these free providers, you will need either PHP or Perl access. Note that it is not enough to know they provide PHP or Perl access: you need to know the kind of environment your scripts run under: is it so restrictive that they are of no earthly use? For PHP scripts, does your web host allow you to use the mail() function? For Perl scripts, do you have access to sendmail or its workalike?

Bandwidth allotment

Nowadays, many free web hosts impose a limit on the amount of traffic your website can use per day and per month. This means that if the pages (and graphic images) on your site is loaded by visitors beyond a certain number of times per day (or per month), the web host will disable your web site (or perhaps send you a bill). It is difficult to recommend a specific minimum amount of bandwidth, since it depends on how you design your site, your target audience, and the number of visitors you're able to attract to your site. In general, 100MB traffic per month is too little for anything other than your personal home page and 1-3GB traffic per month is usually adequate for a simple site just starting out. Your mileage, however, will vary.

Choosing a Commercial Web Host

Reliability and speed of access

Not only should the web host be reliable and fast, it should guarantee its uptime (the time when it is functional). Look for a minimum uptime of 99%. In fact, even 99% is actually too low - it really should be 99.5% or higher. The host should provide some sort of refund (eg prorated refund or discount) if it falls below that figure. Note though that guarantees are often hard to enforce from your end - the host usually requires all sorts of documentation. However, without that guarantee, the web host will have little incentive to ensure that its servers are running all the time.

Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)

Data transfer (sometimes loosely referred to as "traffic" or "bandwidth") is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site.

Don't believe any commercial web host that advertises "unlimited bandwidth". The host has to pay for the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, they will not silently bear your costs. Many high bandwidth websites have found this out the hard way when they suddenly receive an exhorbitant bill for having "exceeded" the "unlimited bandwidth". Always look for details on how much traffic the package allows. I personally always stay clear of any host that advertises "unlimited transfer", even if the exact amount is specified somewhere else (sometimes buried in their policy statements). Usually you will find that they redefine "unlimited" to be limited in some way.

In addition, while bandwidth provided is something you should always check, do not be unduly swayed by promises of incredibly huge amounts of bandwidth. Chances are that your website will never be able to use that amount because it will hit other limits, namely resource limits. For more details, see the article The Fine Print in Web Hosting: Resource Usage Limits.

To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives or the like use less than 3 GB of bandwidth per month. Your traffic requirements will grow over time, as your site becomes more well-known (and well-linked), so you will need to also check their policy for overages: is there a published charge per GB over the allowed bandwidth? Is the charge made according to actual usage or are you expected to pre-pay for a potential overage? It is better not to go for hosts that expect you to prepay for overages, since it is very hard to forsee when your site will exceed its bandwidth and by how much.

Disk space

For the same reason as bandwidth, watch out also for those "unlimited disk space" schemes. Most sites need less than 10 MB of web space, so even if you are provided with a host that tempts you with 200 MB or 500 MB (or "unlimited space"), be aware that you are unlikely to use that space, so don't let the 500 MB space be too big a factor in your consideration when comparing with other web hosts. The hosting company is also aware of that, which is why they feel free to offer you that as a means of enticing you to host there. As a rough gauge, thefreecountry.com, which had about 150 pages when this article was first written, used less than 5 MB for its pages and associated files.

Technical support

Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (often abbreviated 24/7), all year around? Note that I will not accept a host which does not have staff working on weekends or public holidays. You will be surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times. Incidentally, just because a host advertises that it has 24/7 support does not necessarily mean that it really has that kind of support. Test them out by emailing at midnight and on Saturday nights, Sunday mornings, etc. Check out how long they take to respond. Besides speed of responses, check to see if they are technically competent. You wouldn't want to sign up for a host that is run by a bunch of salesmen who only know how to sell and not fix problems.

FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, MySQL, crontabs

If you are paying for a site, you really should make sure you have all of these.

Note that some commercial hosts do not allow you to install PHP or Perl scripts ("What is PHP and Perl?") without their approval. This is not desirable since it means that you have to wait for them before you can implement a feature on your site. ".htaccess" is needed if you are to do things like customize your error pages (pages that display when, say, a user requests for a non-existent page on your site) or to protect your site in various ways (such as to prevent bandwidth theft and hotlinking, etc).

Telnet or SSH access is useful for certain things, including testing certain scripts (programs), maintaining databases, etc. MySQL is needed if you want to run a blog or a content management system. Cron is a type of program scheduler that lets you run programs at certain times of the day (eg, once a day). Check to see if these facilities are provided.

SSL (secure server), Shopping Cart

If you are planning on doing any sort of business through your website, you might want to look out to see if the host provides these facilities. These facilities normally involve a higher priced package or additional charges. The main thing is to check to see if they are available at all before you commit to the host. You will definitely need SSL if you want to collect credit card payments on your site.

Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding

If you have your own site, you would probably want to have email addresses at your own domain, like sales@yourdomain.com, etc. Does the host provide this with the package? Does it allow you to have a catch-all email account that causes any email address at your domain to be routed to you? Can you set an email address to automatically reply to the sender with a preset message (called an autoresponder)? Can you retrieve your mail with your email software? Can it be automatically forwarded to your current email address?

Control Panel

This is called various names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and at the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account. I would not go for a host where I have to go through their technical support each time I want to change a password or add/delete an email account. Such chores are common maintenance chores that every webmaster performs time and time again, and it would be a great hassle if you had to wait for their technical support to make the changes for you.

Multiple Domain Hosting and Subdomains

For those who are thinking of selling web space or having multiple domains or subdomains hosted in your account, you should look to see if they provide this, and the amount extra that they charge for this (whether it is a one-time or monthly charge, etc).

Server

Is the type of operating system and server important? Whether you think so or not on the theoretical level, there are a few practical reasons for looking out for the type of server.

In general, if you want to use things like write/use ASP programs, you have no choice but to look for a Windows server.

Otherwise my preference is to sign up for accounts using the often cheaper, more stable and feature-laden Unix systems running the Apache server. In fact, if dynamically generated pages that can access databases (etc) is what you want, you can always use the more portable (and popular) PHP instead of tying yourself down to ASP. Another reason to prefer Unix-based web hosts (which include web hosts using systems like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc) using the Apache web server is that these servers allow you to configure a lot of facilities that you typically need on your site (error pages, protecting your images, blocking email harvesters, blocking IP addresses, etc) without having to ask your web host to implement them. Knowledge about configuring Apache servers is also widely available, and can be found on thesitewizard.com's Configuring Apache and .htaccess pages as well.

Price

I was actually hesitant to list this, but I guess it's futile not to. However, I would caution that while price is always a factor, you should realise that you often get what you pay for, although it's not necessarily true that the most expensive hosts are the best.

Monthly/Quarterly/Annual Payment Plans

Most web hosts allow you to select an annual payment plan that gives you a cheaper rate than if you were to pay monthly. My current personal preference is to pay monthly with all new web hosts until I'm assured of their reliability and honesty. Paying monthly allows me to switch web hosts quickly when I find that the current host does not meet my requirements: this way, I'm not tied down to a bad web host because I have prepaid for an entire year. I do this even if the new web host guarantees that they will refund the balance if I'm dissatisfied, since at the point I sign up, I have no assurance that they will honour their guarantee. Later (usually after many months or even more than a year), when I'm satisfied with the host, I often change payment plans to the discounted annual plans.

Resellers?

Not all hosting companies own or lease their own web servers. Some of them are actually resellers for some other hosting company. The disadvantage of using a reseller is the possibility that you are dealing with people who don't know much about the system they are selling and who take longer to help you (they have to transmit your technical support request to the actual hosting company for it to be acted upon). However, this also depends on both the reseller and the underlying hosting company. It is thus wise not to rule out all resellers; there are a number of reliable and fast ones who are actually quite good and cheap. In fact, a number of resellers sell the same packages cheaper than their original hosting company. If you find out that a particular company is a reseller, you will need to investigate both the reseller and the real hosting company.

International

If you don't stay in the USA, you have the option of hosting your site with some local provider. The advantage here is the ease of dealing with them (they are after all easily accessible by phone call or a visit), your familiarity with the local laws and easy recourse to those laws should it be necessary. It should be your choice if your target audience is local (eg a local fast food delivery service). On the other hand, hosting it in USA has the advantage of faster access for what is probably the largest number of your overseas visitors (particularly if you have an English-speaking audience). You also have a large number of hosting companies to choose from, and as a result, cheaper prices too.

Others' Reviews

You should make it a point to check out what others have to say about the web host. Some of the places you can do this include:

The newsgroup As you should always do when reading reviews (of anything), read the reviews posted here with a pinch of salt. Some glowing reviews may come from people working for the web host itself, disguised as multiple satisfied customers. Likewise, negative reviews of a particular host can sometimes come from unscrupulous competitors of that host.

thesitewizard.com's review, "Which Web Host Would You Recommend? (FAQ)", found at http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/webhosting.shtml

Although not often, I sometimes make comments about a particular web host in my Budget Web Hosts page on thefreecountry.com as well.

Don't skip this step, or you might find yourself being suckered by a host that everyone else is steering clear of.

capter 4

About rapid application development

Dreamweaver offers a number of rapid application development (RAD) tools, including server behaviors and application objects, that help you build sophisticated web applications without having to write any server-side code.

· • Quickly create pages that search and modify databases and display the results. “Building Master/Detail Pages,” “Building Pages that Search Databases,”, “Building Pages that Modify Databases,”

· • Provide security by restricting access to your pages., “Building Pages that Restrict Access to Your Site,”

Where to start

This guide includes information for readers from a variety of backgrounds. To get the most out of the documentation, start by reading the parts that are most appropriate for you.For web-design novices:

1. Begin by reading the first two chapters of the Getting Started guide. If any section in those chapters seems too advanced or too complex, skip that section and come back to it later.

2. In Using Dreamweaver, , “Exploring the Workspace,” “Planning and Setting Up Your Site,”, “Managing Your Site,” on page, “Setting Up a Document,”

3. Learn about page layout by reading, “Laying Out Pages in Layout View,”

4. To learn about formatting text and including images in your pages, “Inserting and Formatting Text,”, “Inserting Images,”

5. That’s all you really need to begin producing high-quality websites, but when you’re ready to learn how to use more advanced tools, you can proceed through the rest of the static-page chapters in order. You may want to wait to read the dynamic-page chapters until you’re more familiar with creating web pages.

Exploring the Workspace

To get the most out of your Macromedia Dreamweaver MX experience, you should understand the basic concepts behind the Dreamweaver workspace and how to choose options, use inspectors and panels, and set preferences that fit your work style best.

This chapter contains the following topics:

• “Using the Dreamweaver workspace”

• “Using windows and panels in Dreamweaver”

• “Using Dreamweaver with other applications”

• “Customizing Dreamweaver: Basics” o

capter 3

WEBSITE CREATION WORKFLOW

There are many possible approaches to creating a website. In the workflow we present in this documentation, you start by defining a site’s strategy or goals. If you’re developing web applications, you have to set up servers and databases as needed. Then you design the look and feel of the site. When the design is complete, you build the site and code the pages, adding content and interactivity; then you link pages together, and test the site for functionality and to see if it meets its defined objectives. You can include dynamic pages in your site as well. At the end of the cycle, you publish the site on a server. Many evelopers also schedule periodic maintenance to ensure that the site remains current and functional.To make it easier for you to find the information you need as you develop websites, the Using Dreamweaver documentation is divided into broad sections that model this approach to web development—site planning, design, development, testing, and publishing and maintenance.

About laying out web pages

Many web design projects start with storyboards or flowcharts that are turned into sample pages.

Use Dreamweaver to create mock-up sample pages as you work toward a final design. Mock-ups usually show the design layout, site navigation, technical components, themes and color, and graphic images or other media elements, but they don’t contain the final contents of the page.

• The table tools and Layout view in Dreamweaver let you quickly design web pages by drawing and then rearranging the page structure. See Chapter 16, “Presenting Content with Tables,”

• If you want to display multiple documents at once in a web browser, you can lay out documents using frames.

About adding content

Using Dreamweaver, you can easily add a variety of content to web pages. Add assets and design elements, such as text, images, colors, movies, sound, and other forms of media.

• Type directly in a Dreamweaver document, or import text from other documents, then format the text using the Dreamweaver Property inspector, or HTML Styles panel. You can also easily create your own Cascading Style Sheets.

• Use the Assets panel to easily organize the assets in a site; you can then drag most assets directly from the Assets panel into a Dreamweaver document. See “Using the Assets panel”

• Insert images, including rollover images, image maps, and Fireworks sliced images. Use alignment tools to position images in a page. See Chapter 20, “Inserting Images,”

, “Dreamweaver Integration with Other Applications,”

• Insert other types of media in a web page, such as Flash, Shockwave, and QuickTime movies, sound, and applets., “Inserting Media,”

• Be sure to make your content accessible to people with disabilities.

About interactivity and animation

Many web pages are static, containing only text and images. Dreamweaver allows you to go beyond static pages, using interactivity and animation to capture visitors’ interest. You can give visitors feedback as they move and click, demonstrate concepts, animate page elements—in short, you can let visitors see and do more within the page.There are several ways to add interactivity and animation to your pages using Dreamweaver:

• Use behaviors to perform tasks in response to specific events, such as highlighting a button when the visitor passes the pointer over it, validating a form when the visitor clicks the Submit button, or opening a second browser window when the main page is finished loading.

• Use timelines to create animations that do not require plug-ins, ActiveX controls, or Java. Timelines use dynamic HTML to change the position of a layer or the source of an image over time or to call behavior actions automatically after the page has loaded. “Animating Layers,”

About connecting the pages on your site

Individual pages don’t make a site; you need to link your pages together, both by creating HTML links and by reusing content to give pages a common appearance.

· • With Dreamweaver you can create standard HTML links, including anchor links and e-mail links, or eas “Linking and Navigation,” on page 399.

· • Dreamweaver templates and library files let you easily apply reusable content and page designs to your site. You can create new pages based on a Dreamweaver template, then update the layout of those pages automatically when the template changes. Site Assets, Libraries, and Template

About testing and publishing your siteYour site is complete and ready for the world—but before you publish it on a server, you must testthe site. Depending on the size of the project, client specifications, and kinds of browsers that visitors will use, you may need to move your site to a staging server where it can be tested and edited. When corrections have been made, you publish the site where the public can access it. Once the site is published, establish a maintenance cycle to ensure quality, respond to user feedback, and update the site’s information.Use the following Dreamweaver features to test and publish your site:

· • To add new tags in a page or fix your code, use the Dreamweaver Reference panel to look up JavaScript, CSS and HTML code. See “Accessing language references” on page 200.

· • Use the JavaScript Debugger to help you fix JavaScript errors in your code. The debugger lets you set breakpoints in the code, then allows you to view the code as a page is debugged right in Dreamweaver. See “Using the JavaScript debugger”

· • Run browser and plug-in checks, test and fix links in your documents, and run site reports to check HTML files for common mistakes. See Chapter 28, “Testing a Site,”

· • In the Dreamweaver Site panel you’ll find many tools to help you manage your site, transfer files to and from a remote server, set up a Check In/Check Out process to prevent files from being overwritten, and synchronize the files on your local and remote sites. “Planning and Setting Up Your Site,”

About creating dynamic pages

In Dreamweaver, you can define a variety of sources of dynamic content, including recordsets extracted from databases, form parameters, and JavaBeans components. To add the dynamic content to a page, simply drag it onto the page.

You can set your page to display one record or many records at a time, display more than one page of records, add special links to move from one page of records to the next (and back), and create record counters to help users keep track of the records.

· • If you’re unfamiliar with creating web applications in Dreamweaver, learn how to use Dreamweaver to build dynamic pages., “Optimizing the Workspace for Visual Development,”, “The Dreamweaver Workflow for Dynamic Page Design,”

· Define and display dynamic content on your pages., “Storing and Retrieving Data for Your Page,” 2, “Defining Sources of Dynamic Content,” “Adding Dynamic Content to Web Pages,” “Displaying Database Records,”

· • Encapsulate application or business logic using leading-edge technologies such as ColdFusion components and web services. See Chapter 35, “Using ColdFusion Components,”, “Using Web Services,”

· • If you need more flexibility, you can create your own server behaviors and interactive forms., “Adding Custom Server Behaviors,”, “Creating Interactive Forms,”

capter 2

LEARNING DREAMWEAVER

Dreamweaver includes a variety of resources to help you learn the program quickly and become proficient in creating your own websites and pages. These resources include a printed Getting Started guide, an online help system, and tutorials. In addition, you can find regularly updated tips, TechNotes, examples, and information at the Dreamweaver Support Center on the Macromedia website.

Getting Started Guide

The Getting Started guide is designed to guide you through the process of creating a simple but functional website using Dreamweaver. It’s aimed at users who have created web pages but are unfamiliar with particular aspects of Dreamweaver. It includes hapters on creating and editing simple static pages, editing the code by hand, and creating ynamic web applications. The guide is provided as a printed manual, as part of the help system, and as a PDF file.

Tutorials

The tutorials provide further lessons on particular topics, giving more information in specific areas than the rest of the Getting Started guide. By working through the tutorials, you’ll learn how to edit a sample website with some of the most useful and powerful design features of Dreamweaver. The tutorials are available in the printed Getting Started guide, in Dreamweaver Help (in the Help menu in Dreamweaver, choose Tutorials), and as part of the Getting Started PDF file.If you’re already familiar with Dreamweaver’s design features but want to know more about building web applications, start with the dynamic-page tutorials, which teach you how to create interactive pages that connect to databases.

Dreamweaver Help

Dreamweaver Help provides comprehensive information about all Dreamweaver features, optimized for online reading. Dreamweaver Help is displayed in the help viewer provided by your operating system: Microsoft HTML Help (Windows) or Apple Help (Macintosh). On both platforms, you can find the information you need in any of four ways:

The table of contents enables you to see all of the information organized by subject. Click top-level entries to view subtopics. The index, like a traditional printed index, allows you to look up specific terms or concepts.Search allows you to find any character string, anywhere in the text of the help system.Context-sensitive help provides a way to open a relevant help topic from each dialog box, panel, and inspector. To view context-sensitive help, click a Help button in a dialog box, or choose Help from the Options menu in a panel group’s title bar, or click the question-mark icon in an inspector or other kind of window. Each help topic provides buttons you can click to move from topic to topic. The left and right arrow buttons move to the previous or next topic in a section (in the order in which the topics are listed in the table of contents).

Extending Dreamweaver

The Extending Dreamweaver help system provides information on the Dreamweaver Document Object Model and the APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow JavaScript and C developers to create extensions for Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver Support Center

To help you get the most out of Dreamweaver, you can consult a web-based support center. The Dreamweaver Support Center website at http://www.macromedia.com/support/dreamweaver/ is updated regularly with the latest information on Dreamweaver, plus advice from expert users, examples, tips, updates, and information on advanced topics. Check the website often for the latest news on Dreamweaver and how to get the most out of the program.

Design & Developer Center

The Macromedia Design & Developer Center at http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/ providestools, tutorials, and more for all Macromedia products.

Dreamweaver online forums

Discuss technical issues and share helpful hints with other Dreamweaver users by visiting the Dreamweaver online forums. You’ll find information on accessing the forums on the Macromedia website a http://www.macromedia.com/go/dreamweaver_newsgroup.

Keyboard shortcuts

Charts showing all the keyboard shortcuts in the default Dreamweaver configuration are available on the Macromedia website at http://www.macromedia.com/go/dreamweaver_mx_shortcuts.

CHAPTER 1

WELCOME TO DREAMWEAVER

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX is a professional HTML editor for designing, coding, and developing websites, web pages, and web applications. Whether you enjoy the control of hand-coding HTML or prefer to work in a visual editing environment, Dreamweaver provides you with helpful tools to enhance your web creation experience.

The visual editing features in Dreamweaver let you quickly create pages without writing a line of code. You can view all your site elements or assets and drag them from an easy-to-use panel directly into a document. You can streamline your development workflow by creating and editing images in Macromedia Fireworks, then importing them directly into Dreamweaver, or by adding Macromedia Flash objects you create directly in dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver also includes many coding-related tools and features, including code editing tools in the Code view (such as code coloring and tag completion); reference material on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CFML, ASP, and JSP; and a JavaScript Debugger. Macromedia Roundtrip HTML technology imports your hand-coded HTML documents without reformatting the code; you can then choose to reformat code with your preferred formatting style.

And Dreamweaver now incorporates and expands on all of the capabilities from Macromedia UltraDev, helping you to build dynamic database-backed web applications using server languages such as ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), JSP, and PHP. Dreamweaver is fully customizable. You can create your own objects and commands, modify keyboard shortcuts, and even write JavaScript code to extend dreamweaver capabilities with new behaviors, Property inspectors, and site reports.This chapter contains the following sections:

· “Learning Dreamweaver”

· “Website creation workflow”

· “Where to start”

· “Typographical conventions”

· “What’s new in Dreamweaver MX”

· “HTML and web technologies resources”