What Makes For A Good Host?

By Richard Lowe
Posted Friday, June 18, 2004

I've had to change web hosts a number of times. In fact, I spent most of
this week changing from one host to another. Believe me, it is a major pain,
although I have made sure that my site is always ready to move if necessary.

One thing I've become is very aware of the difference between a good host
and a bad host. To put it simply (and obviously) a good host makes it easy
for you to create and maintain your web site. A bad host gets in the way and
makes you angry, unhappy and gives you an ulcer.

The key point to remember when evaluating hosts is the most important
quality is responsiveness - of your site and support people. Your site
should be up virtually all of the time (unfortunately computer crashes do
happen but they should be rare and far between) and it must be fast. In
addition, all good hosts react in a timely manner to support issues and
questions. You can tell when a host is going bad from the failure of these
key areas - unresponsive technical support, slow servers or constant
downtime.

This article is intended as a kind of checklist - what is essential,
essential if you need it, optional and not important at all? Look it over,
then when you go to find a good host pull out the article and make sure it
measures up.

Essential Qualities

There are a few attributes which are common to all good hosts.

Reasonable support - This is something you won't know until you've started
using a web host and hopefully you will not need much support. However, when
you have a question, concern or problem, it's essential that the you have a
way to contact the support staff. Just as important is the handling of the
issue needs to be fast and efficient. I wouldn't insist on a phone number,
but an email or form interface with quick responses is essential.

Even if you don't have any particular reason to contact support, it's a good
idea to send off a message occasionally just to see if they are on the ball.

Access to control panel - You should not use a host unless it gives you
access to a well defined control panel. What does this do for you? It allows
you to control the features of your web site (account) from your web
browser. For example, using the menu you should be able to upload files,
protect directories, add autoresponders and so on.

Excellent automation - This is perhaps one of the more important features of
a good host. Automation. You should be able to access everything you want
from a well designed menu and do virtually anything without involving a
human being.

Control of creating protected directories - Sometimes it doesn't seem
important, but sooner or later you will almost certainly want to create a
protected directory. This is a directory (or folder) on your web site which
requires a username and password. Any good web host will allow you to do
this directly from your account menu.

Error pages - I would not host my site anywhere I could not create my own
401, 403 and 404 errors pages. I like the idea of letting visitors know in a
nice way when there is a problem. The better hosts allow these files to be
maintained from the control panel, although some simply allow you to edit
your .htaccess file directly.

Reasonable performance - A web site must load quickly. It's hard enough to
get page sizes down to the point where they load reasonably quickly without
your web host slowing things down.

Domain Parking - It's incredible useful to be able to park a domain on your
web site. This can be useful for having several closely related domain names
(internet-tips.net and internet-secrets.net for exmaple) as well as to just
reserve domains for future use. A good host should be able to allow you to
do this for at least a dozen domain names.

Good stuff to have if you need it

Telnet access - Being able to access your site from Telnet (command line) is
useful to me, but most webmasters will never need this function. This is
especially true if functions such as CRONTAB (scheduling tasks) can be done
through the control panel.

Custom CGI scripts - If you are paying for a host, then you should make sure
you can install your own CGI scripts. This is not important, of course, if
you don't plan on including any of your own scripts.

PERL Support - If you use PERL routines, then this is essential. Again, this
is not absolutely necessary if you are not using PERL.

SSI Support - Server Side Includes are a very nice way to make it easy to
make changes to your web pages. Again, you either need it or you don't.

PHP Support - PHP is a great server-side scripting language (far superior to
ASP). If you can get it on a host (and most paid hosts support PHP) then you
are doing well.

MySQL Support - MySQL is database tool. This allows you to get input from
visitors, store it on your web site and allow your visitors to retrieve it
later.

Unlimited autoresponders - I think most web hosts offer unlimited
autoresponders with the feeling that they will not be used much. They always
seem surprised to find that I've used them at all. Autoresponders are a
great way to automate your web site, so it's a good idea to get them. If
your host doesn't offer them and you wind up needing them, then you will
need to purchase them from somewhere else.

Direct access to server logs - You can get along without accessing server
logs, but it sure makes it easier to tell how you site is doing.

Upload from the control panel in addition to FTP access - I almost always
use FTP access to upload (and download) files from my site. However, there
odd occasions when I've used the control panel upload. Not essential, but
nice to be able to use once in a while.

SSL Support - This is needed if you want to run secure web pages from your
site.

Subdomains - A subdomain is a domain in the format of subdomain.domain. For
example, wallpapers.internet-tips.net is a subdomain. These are very useful
for separating functional areas of your site. A good web host will allow you
to have as many of these on your site as you want.

FrontPage Support - Well, if you use FrontPage then you will obviously need
to be able to upload pages. Personally, I would just as soon use FTP, as
it's usually faster and better, even when using FrontPage for site
development.

Not incredibly useful to most people

Web hosts like to say these things are important, but in reality they are
mostly bells and whistles.

Search engine submission - All web hosts will boast in their promotional
materials that they will submit your site for you to the search engines. You
should be doing this anyway, so it's not incredibly useful that a host will
do it for you.

BGMAILBOX and everyone.net support - These can be nice services, but they
really are not necessary for most people. I think the main reason why I
would want these in a host is simply to know they are available.

PERL modules - A few hosts will install PERL modules for you. This is a way
to extend the functionality of PERL, and it's not very useful to most
webmasters. However, if you do find a host which will let you do this, then
you can be sure you can do almost anything.

About the Author
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets at
(http://www.internet-tips.net) - Visit our website any time to read
over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your
internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.