Once you’ve decided that your company needs a website and you’ve hired a development team, you need to choose a website hosting provider. It’s a good idea to discuss your web hosting choices with your development team as they are in the best position to tell you what criteria are important to run your website efficiently.

 Do be aware that the highly publicized discount rates are not really discounts. As with anything in this world, you get what you pay for and those “cheap” or “budget” website hosts actually charge an enormous amount when you compare what services you receive.

It’s really a classic case of bait and switch. They sell you hosting very cheaply but the hosting and its abilities are extremely limited. The upgrades that you will eventually need are also overpriced. Most costumers discover that by the time they have finished purchasing add-ons their “cheap” domain is actually almost twice as much as a reputable hosting company.

ForeScene does not recommend free web hosting services of any kind. It is our opinion that the advertising put on the site by the host detracts for your message. And, those sites which offer free hosting without forced ads close with an alarming frequency as they are unable to cover their operation costs.

ForeScene, like most professional web solutions, does offer multiple hosting packages. Keep in mind that development occurs on local servers so by choosing to host with your development team you are 100% guaranteed that your web server could support the scripts, databases and other criteria for your site. What’s more, when you launch your website the DNS simply needs to be changed to our servers; so you can be up and running much quicker. We also take care of domain registration for you as well. Finally, any problems you may have with your website, email or server can be solved in a timely manner by a team who you already know.  After all, to us you’re not only a client but also a partner. To large servers companies and their many resellers you are simply a number.

If, however, you still decide to shop around for another web host please use the following criteria.

Reliability & 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 web host that guarantees and uptime of 99.5% or higher.

Data Transfer / 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 exorbitant bill for having "exceeded" the "unlimited bandwidth.” Trust that there is limiting language buried somewhere in your policy statement.
In addition, while bandwidth is important do not be 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 (CPU usage, RAM Usage, Database Connections).
To give you an estimate of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives use less than 3 GB of bandwidth per month. However, your traffic requirements will grow over time, as your site becomes more popular; therefore, you will need to 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? Since you can’t predict when you will exceed bandwidth, its better not to choose a web hosting company that expects prepayment for overages.

Disk Space

Also watch out for hosting companies that claim “unlimited disk space.” You don’t need it; you’ll never use it. It’s simply an enticement tool.

Technical Support

Make sure you choose a web-hosting provider that is responsive to your needs as well as technically proficient.

FTP, PHP, Perl CGI-BIN access, SSI, .htaccess, crontabs

Your paid web host should have all of these services available. Be aware that many commercial hosts do not allow you to install PHP or CGI scripts independently without permission. You will need htaccess to customize a variety of site handling issues, like error pages or hot linking. Cron jobs may be needed for periodic programs and maintenance like backing up your data. All of these services are essential to running an efficient and productive website.

SSL (secure server), MySQL, Shopping Cart

An e-commerce store means you need a database. If you need a database, you need to ensure that your web host can support SSL, MySQL and shopping cart functionality.

Email, Auto responders, POP3, Mail Forwarding

It’s important to make sure that your web hosting company can create domain specific web site email accounts (i.e. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ).  You should be able to forward your account to another address or utilize POP3 services. Auto responders are also a critical business tool and needs to be part of your email criteria.

Control Panel

Control Panels have a variety of commercial names (cpanel, plesk, etc.) but they all serve the same purpose. They all allow you to manage your account independently. Without a control panel, even the simplest chores have to be implemented by their technical support team and often at a price.

Server

Like the differences between a Mac and a PC, servers also have different operating systems. The technology used to develop your website dictates what OS your server should have.

Generally, ASP requires Windows NT/2000/XP server capabilities. While other scripts, PHP, CFM, JSP can run on UNIX or Apache servers.

As this is critical to your website let me be clear, DO NOT choose a web host without knowing what technology your website utilizes.

Again, your web development team can be the best guide if not provider for all your web-hosting solutions. As your web server is actually hosting your site, its features and functionality directly correlate to your performance and success. It’s important to choose wisely. Again, you get what you pay for.