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Choose your Host carefully

You're going to get your corporate Web site online. So with a song in your heart and all the trepidation of a 16-year-old shopping for his first car you begin to phone hosting providers. As you make your calls, salesman after salesman buries you in technobabble and bewildering acronyms. To avoid the risk of embarrassment that often comes with admitting ignorance, you nod away until you've been sold the finest hosting package that money can buy.

Read on to discover how to evaluate a prospective hosting package to make sure it's just what you and your company needs. All this without compromising scalability or aggravating your Web page designer.

As with any product or service the difference between a good product and a great product is the add-ons. The way I see it, those add-ons fall into three distinct categories: reporting, scripting and administration. It's your job to review the objectives you have for your site and determine how to achieve them. From there, your Web design guy, (unless that's you) should be able to help you decide who to go with.

Most hosting services will provide some basic statistical reporting to give you a sense of how much traffic your site is generating and where it is from.

Many Web sites have graduated from the school of brochure-ware to the exciting world of dynamic content and server-side includes. We hear these terms tossed about a fair bit these days but what do they mean to the average business-owner who's shopping for a Web site host? In order for a site to deliver dynamic content that is delivered server-side, you need a command interpreter or an application server. If your hosting provider is running either of these services, your designer is free to use whatever executable scripts are suitable for them. Server-side services of this type can let you do everything from sending user input via an e-mail message to running full applications in support of your e-commerce effort.

Server-side scripting comes in many flavours, the two main platforms being Unix and Windows (with more command interpreters and application servers becoming available in both all the time). On NT server platforms, you can choose from Perl 5, Active Server Pages, C/C++, Cold Fusion 4.0, SSI (Server Side Includes), Java (Servlets & Applets), Python, PHP 3.0 and many more. If you have already picked out a developer or are researching an application to be run with your site, it's essential to be mindful of which services you will have at your disposal when you settle down in your new online home.

Which platform should you host with? Remember that the majority of leading Internet applications are available and built for both the UNIX and the NT environments. So, availability of scripting and application server tools for your platform of choice is quickly becoming a moot point. Let's look at the two platforms from the standpoint of performance, security and reliability.

UNIX (and other POSIX-compliant platforms such as Linux and the BSD family of spin-offs) have proven to be substantially faster than most GUI-based (Graphical User Interface) server platforms as well as the most secure environments available. However, UNIX is best known for its reliability and performance. Unlike the Microsoft NT environment, UNIX uses no GUI overhead and is able to concentrate its full resources on its main job - in this case, serving your Web site.

So, why would you choose NT as a hosting platform? NT has become the operating system of choice for some providers and developers because of its relative ease-of-use. The NT environment offers flexibility and a user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface), complete with today's top tools and utilities. While NT developers work to address a number of outstanding security issues, it has been endorsed by the U.S. federal government as a secure operating environment. NT's Web server is called Internet Information Server (ISS), the only HTTP (Web) server software fully integrated into the Windows NT server. IIS is the server environment that supports proprietary Microsoft server-side Web applications such as Active Server Pages (ASP).

When it comes to making changes on your site, there is nothing worse than having to phone someone to have them made. That's why, when you are shopping for a hosting provider, it's a good idea to look at the self-administration features been built into your platform of choice. Will you be able to add and remove e-mail addresses? Will you be able to monitor your site's statistics? In the case of UNIX, will you be able to modify permissions on directories and files from your browser? This last point is especially important as many hosting providers do not provide command line access for security reasons.

Make sure, when shopping for a Virtual Hosting Provider, that your choice will be the right one to help you meet the goals you've set for your site. Don't be afraid to ask questions, and don't be afraid to shop around. Ask potential hosting providers what makes them different from their competitors. Find out who your business associates have used and ask if they are satisfied. Take advantage of any reviews that have been written on hosting providers.