The selections offered with a web hosting package are quite wide ranging, and can be a bit confusing to realize – specifically considering that the options are presenting in a large number of ways, and condensed in numerous techniques, though purchasing for a package on-line. Hopefully I can give you a breakdown of the categories these characteristics fall into and enable you to concentrate on the characteristics that are critical to you.
I break the characteristics down into 10 categories, and will talk about the categories one particular by a single to give you a firm grasp of the selections and make an informed purchasing selection.
ten Categories of Web Hosting Package Features
1. Operating Technique
two. Web Server
3. Bandwidth
four. Disk Space
five. Domains
6. E mail
7. FTP
8. Database
9. Control Panel
10. Applications / Programming
1. Operating Method
The operating method is the underlying software that runs on the host. It manages the physical hardware of the server and attempts to optimize the use of RAM, disk space, network, and CPU for the requests coming into the machine. The underlying OS does not have to be the similar as your desktop or even the OS you use to create your web site. In reality, due to most of the management functions becoming driven via a web GUI, you may possibly never know or care what the server operating technique is.
The predominant operating systems you will obtain though buying for a internet hosting service are Windows and UNIX. With Windows you will see versions available such as Server 2003 or Server 2008, and with UNIX you will see a lot of brands of Linux, generally CentOS, Debian, or Redhat. Deciding on amongst UNIX and Windows is an important decision, and includes a lot of variables, but in the finish it basically suggests deciding if you want to construct your web-site with open supply technologies or with Microsoft technology.
Study the application you want to use or run as your web page and verify to see if it has any Microsoft technologies specifications (MSSQL database, MSAccess database, ASP, ASP.Net). If you uncover no pressing cause to use Windows, then UNIX will most likely be a superior selection for you. UNIX runs the open source scripting languages slightly faster and is also slightly less costly than Windows.
There are a few particular sub-attributes of the operating method that might be of value to you.
Do you want a virtual private server? This provides you a committed virtual operating program all to yourself alternatively of you sharing the OS with other individuals. You nonetheless share a machine with others, but there are stricter walls in location to assure you bandwidth, CPU, and memory even if a site on the identical machine is obtaining heavily hit. It also offers you terrific configuration alternatives with every thing since it is your own OS. These packages are a lot more expensive than the shared selections, but are worth if as your internet site grows. Offshore Dedicated Servers vary is the amount of RAM committed to you, so I would recommend going with the smallest package and monitoring the RAM usage more than time and upgrading into a larger package as required.
Do you want a dedicated SSL certificate? Most websites give a shared SSL certificate, which is fine for some smaller web pages, but if you are running a medium or substantial ecommerce website you will need to have a dedicated certificate. Some purchasers justifiably will not send in their private and credit card information and facts without a assured valid SSL private certificate. Also some shopping cart applications need the committed certificate as properly. Be cautious when purchasing for this – some hosting services say they give a SSL certificate with all their hosting plans but do not explicitly inform you that it is a shared certificate. If the program does not consist of a dedicated IP, then it is a shared certificate.
To straight remotely administer your site, you could need to have to either shell into with UNIX or Remote Desktop in with Windows. The UNIX shell option is at times referred to as SSH Shell, Safe Shell, or telnet. These options are only valuable to you if you intend to do low level upkeep and tweaking, mainly in the VPS packages. With a superior hosting package with a high powered handle panel, you will not have to have either of these.
You may well see mention for the capacity to schedule cron jobs – this is the UNIX version of scheduled tasks. This capability is only required if you wish to run scheduled tasks at set instances, such as a nightly backup. Most of the excellent handle panels provide an interface for the cron job entry, but they also offer interfaces for performing upkeep tasks such as backups. You will possibly under no circumstances want this function.
two. Web Server
The net hosting businesses generally offer Microsoft IIS or UNIX Apache net servers. Both have their plusses and minuses, and it will only make a difference to you if the web site you are building or the application you are running needs a single or the other. Apache, getting open supply itself, has slightly greater hooks in it to run several of the open source content material management systems and blog engines based on PHP, PERL, and Python, so go with Apache if that is all you need. The Windows IIS also has quite good open supply content management systems and blog engines primarily based on ASP and ASP.Net, but I would recommend not going with a PHP/PERL/Python net application on Windows IIS – see the above discussion of the operating method as to why.
The SSL certificate is hosted by the net server, and the web server has to do extra processing of SSL HTTPS requests – it has to encrypt/decrypt and verify data passing amongst the client and the server. For this explanation, some would argue that you must shy away from internet hosting packages that provide no cost SSL shared certificates to absolutely everyone. You could finish up sharing a server with 100s of other web sites that overtax the server. A properly run web-site will only go into HTTPS SSL mode for the actual entering of credit card information, not for the entire web page – but you do not know if the other web-sites on your server are properly run.