Webhosting Tips
As an Internet Marketer, you'll sooner or later need one or multiple websites. (Unless you are specializing as a pure GoogleCash marketer...)
For publishing websites you need a webhosting company. They run the servers and are directly connected to an Internet Backbone.
There are a whole lot of companies providing WebHosting and it is difficult to choose a webhoster which suites your needs.
I think that following criteria are important for a good webhoster.
- The technical operation has to work reliably. Period. This includes good performance of servers and Internet connection.
- It has to be easy to use and there has to be a
good documentation and welcome
mail which explains the important steps. Ideally, you should be able
to do anything easily without having to ask their customer-support.
Ease of use saves you a lot of time, and remember: time is money.
- Customer support has to be competent and react in short time. Even if you have an easy-to-use webhoster, you may sometimes have questions.
- The people should be competent, easy-going and pragmatic, so they actually are a help even in complicated and non-standard situations.
- Everything should be simple and unbuerocratic.
- They have to provide the standard combo of PHP, MySQL, perl-cgi. This is sufficient for most, even very advanced, web projects.
- They should provide a lot of email-accounts
(ideally unlimited)
and a catchall email forwarder for each domain.
This is an important issue even if you are a one-man show or small company:
With nowadays SPAM-problems I suggest to use a different email adress for each and every signup form. You can receive emails from all those different email adresses in a single email account by the use of a catchall forwarder.
And in case you hit a black sheep which gives away your email adress, you can easily block just this one email adress.
Using different email addresses with every signup also has the benefit that you can receive emails for important or high-volume accounts in extra email accounts or let each of your (future) employees handle emails from a specific set of business partners.
- If they offer a SPAM-filter,
this filter must have an option to be switched off
or at least an option to tag suspected SPAM-emails instead of throwing them away.
This is important because
- I don't like the idea that a machine decides on some obscure rules what I am supposed to read and what I am not supposed to read. You may not like that either.
- SPAM-filters tend to filter out legitimate marketing-related emails which you probably don't want to miss. SPAM-filters are triggered by a lot of words which are common in marketing-related conversation.
- SPAM-filters may filter emails from your customers or business partners and this can make you loose customers or business partners and harm your reputation for not answering emails.
- There are other ways to cope with spam, e.g. using a different email adress for each and every signup, ...
- If you (plan to) have a lot of websites, then
- the webhoster has to have a webhosting-plan which allows hosting of a large or unlimited number of domains.
- they should only charge the usual domain registrar fees but no additional "domain setup fees".
- Initial setup should be fast
because if you have a good idea
you want to realize it ASAP, I guess. :-)
Good hosters
- have the hosting itself setup in a few hours
- and have the domain-name up in less than 24 hours.
- They should also offer more advanced hosting and features than you currently need, so you can stay with the same hoster if you need more space, bandwidth, domains, SSL-encryption, dedicated hosting and the like in the future
- After you select a webhoster, you have to select which
of their webhosting plans to use.
I suggest to always go for the lowest priced plan which fulfills all your current and short term requirements. You can always upgrade later if you need more space or bandwidth.
Bandwidth is usually not an issue nowadays, so don't buy bandwidth which you don't need.
If you are in the lucky position that you need more bandwidth than provided by your hosting plan, you have to get really vast amounts of traffic and you are most probably making tons of cash from that traffic, so upgrading will be a non-issue then.
- Pricing has to be OK.
It is on purpose that I list pricing as the last point. Pricing is only important if all other points are equal. It doesn't matter so much if you pay a few dollars more or less per month. But failure in the other points above may cost you a whole lot more in money or lost time (which you could otherwise use to earn money or spend quality time with friends and family).
If you have a hoster which fulfills all the points above, stick with it by all means! You have found your ideal partner.
If you are still looking for a webhoster or if you are not satisfied with your current hoster, I suggest you use a hoster where somebody you trust has good experiences with.
In case you are interested, I have good experiences with the following two webhosters:
- HostHead.com, a US-based Hoster
-
I host two of my domains there and I plan to host more domains there,
especially all new domains which I estimate to have the majority of visitors from
the US and Canada.
For starters, they have a plan with one domain for only $2.95/month if you pay one year in advance. The plan includes 200MB space which is more than enough for most website projects.
For multiple domain hosters, they have a plan with unlimited domains for $24.95 per month + domain registrar fees for additional domains.
Payment can be done with Paypal, so it is easy and convenient.
- all-inkl.com, a German/European Hoster
-
I have most of my domains hosted there. Their web management software
is easy to use and their support is competent and reacts fast.
Their website is on German but their webmanagement software can be configured for other languages (English, Dutch, Italian, German).
They have a hosting plan which allows you to host up to 150 domains with one account for only EUR 4.95 per month. (Registrar-fees for one domain are included. For additional domains you have to pay these fees extra.)
Among others, I host this website, InternetMarketingPage.com, on all-inkl.com using this hosting plan.