A.
FREE WEB-SPACE
The appeal of free web space is obvious, that it is FREE
!
Usually the provider
offers a limited amount of space ranging from 10meg to 50meg of free space,
in addition to basic online web authoring tools, and basic file manager
type web based access to the site directory for uploading.
Where do I
get the free web space ?
The first port of
call should be your ISP, as usually included in the monthly payments is
free web space. After which there are numerous free web space portals
out there. Including many pay for space companies which offer a free basic
account, that members can later upgrade from to paid accounts.
Should I use
free space for my website ?
Free web space is
fine for personal websites, but all commerce websites should use paid
for space sites for a number of important reasons as summarised below
:
1. Reliability
and uptime. Free space is notoriously unreliable, with low uptime's,
which makes it very problematic if your site is constantly down or unavailable.
2 Advertising
- The majority of free web space sites plant a banner on your
site, right at the top to advertise their own products and services.
3. Access
control - You are highly limited in the amount of access you
have to the site, in terms of control over the site functions. I.e. most
free sites will not accept installation of third party scripts, other
than those made available. Additionally some may not accept any kind of
script to be run from the free web space server. Other problems occur
with telnet and FTP access which is likely to be limited.
4. BANDWIDTH
- If your site becomes popular then your site will likely be
penalised for excessive bandwidth usage, which can mean that your site
being deleted without notice.
In conclusion, free
web space is good as an early learning tool, i.e. to mess about at your
leisure with the basics of website design, and also okay for low bandwidth
personal sites, such as photo galleries and about me sites. But if you
want a serious website than the only real option is to pay for web space
B.
PAY FOR WEB-SPACE
Having decided that to develop a serious long-term website
that you really do need to pay for it. So now what ? What do we actually
need to pay for ?
What should
you look for in paid space ?
1. Reliability
and Fast Access Speed
The web host be both
reliable and fast, and it should also guarantee its uptime (the time when
it is functional). Look for an absolute minimum uptime of 99%. In reality
uptime would be expected to be higher. The host should offer some sort
of guarantee for the minimum uptime, which acts as an incentive for the
host to ensure that its servers are running all the time.
2. Disk Space
Contrary to what you
may believe, generally more is not better !. Many websites offer extremely
high or unlimited web space Usually company's that offer a large amount
of space do so knowing that it is highly unlikely that you will ever use
all of that web space, and if you do you can expect to be penalised somehow.
So okay how much disk
space ? Well as an example the whole walsoft.net website occupies less
than 50 Meg of space ! And typically the vast majority of websites in
existence occupy less than 20 megs of diskspace. So you can forgo the
high gigabyte options such as 1 gig space, as you are not going to need
it ! More important is that you are getting reliable, commercial web space
with a good uptime. To conserve on costs the initial aim is for web space
of approx 50meg to 200megs. As you can always later upgrade the space
you need in response to demand.
3. Bandwidth
/ Data Transfer
Bandwidth is the amount
megabytes of data transferred from your site to the visitors that browse
your site on a monthly basis.
Again there is a lot
of hype surrounding bandwidth, where many websites offer unlimited bandwidth.
Knowing full well that the majority of customers will hardly use their
bandwidth allocation. Also usually unlimited bandwidth means limited bandwidth
but usually hidden away in the terms and conditions. So stear well away
from unlimited bandwidth sites !
So how much
Bandwidth ?
Even a well visited
site, is unlikely to generate more than 1 gigabyte of bandwidth in the
first few years of operation. Thus going for 50gigabyte or more accounts
is a complete waste of money. Typically you should aim for between 1gig
and 5gig of monthly bandwidth accounts, as anything above that is likely
to never be used.
When selecting a web
host, you should also consider what are the costs associated with going
over the allotted bandwidth, usually this is indicated in a cost per gigabyte.
4. Server
Access - FTP, PHP, Perl CGI-BIN access, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH crontabs,
MYSQL Databases
Your host should offer
you access to all of the above via a Administrative control panel, without
any need to contact the host for installation of PHP programs etc. if
the host requires you to contact them to install any scripts then you
should look elsewhere.
Extras - Installed
scripts
Many hosts already
have pre-prepared scripts that can be installed from within the Administrative
control panel at the click of a mouse, typical software includes, shopping
carts, discussion forums, galleries etc.
5. Email ,
POP 3, Mail forwarding, Autoresponders
The host should allow
full email access and functions from within the administrative control
panel, which will allow you to create and manage email accounts off the
websites domain name. This should include options such as a catch all
email address, email forwarding, autoresponders which is an email set
to automatically reply to senders with a preset message.
6. Price -
How much should you pay ?
Having settled on
an control panel access hosting package, offering services such as listed
above, with approx 100meg of web space and 1-5 gig of monthly bandwidth,
typically this should not cost more than $10 / £6 per month or $120
/ £70 per year. So definitely you are not looking at some of the
prices quoted at random which can range as high as $50 / £30 per
month !
Since walsoft.net
primary offers web space as part of dynamic solutions, we don't offer
stand alone web space and thus recommend the following low cost web hosts
having taken account of our strict criteria as above (updated
August 05) :
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