The Best Possible Profitable Niche Web Host

The criteria for choosing a free web host and a commercial web host differ slightly and it is possible to meet most of your niche marketing business hosting needs with one of the many free hosting services. However, due to their lack of functionality and the requirement for you to place,often invasive advertisng imposed your niche marketing site, it is strongly recommended that you choose a reputable commercial web hosting solution such as Hostmonster. 

Web hosting is, in general, relatively inexpensive and it is certainly worth paying a few dollars a month for the substancial advantages you gain over the free alternative. Certainly there is no free webhosti that can offer anything like the massive bandwidth and storage offered by Hostmonster (more of these terms later). Therefore, for our purposes, we are only going to consider the factors you should consider if you are choosing a commercial web host.

Not only should the web host be reliable and fast, it should guarantee its uptime (the time when it is functional). Look for a minimum uptime of 99%. In fact, even 99% is actually too low - it really should be 99.5% or higher. The host should provide some sort of refund (eg prorated refund or discount) if it falls below that figure. Note though that guarantees are often hard to enforce from your end - the host usually requires all sorts of documentation. However, without that guarantee, the web host will have little incentive to ensure that its servers are running all the time.

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 exhorbitant bill for having "exceeded" the "unlimited bandwidth". Always look for details on how much traffic the package allows. Try to avoid any host that advertises "unlimited transfer", even if the exact amount is specified somewhere else (sometimes buried in their policy statements). Usually you will find that they will eventually redefine their interpretation of "unlimited", especially if your site is a roaring success.

Furthermore, while bandwidth provided is something you should always check, do not be unduly 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. 

As a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives or the like use less than 3 GB of bandwidth per month. Your traffic requirements will grow over time, as your profitable niche marketing site becomes more well-known (and well-linked), so you will need to also check their policy for overages (this is the published charge per GB over the allowed bandwidth. It goes without saying that these charges should be totally clear and unambiguous).

For the same reason as bandwidth, watch out also for so called "unlimited disk space" shemes. Most sites need less than 10 MB of web space, so even if you are provided with a host that tempts you with 200 MB or 500 MB (or "unlimited space"), be aware that you are unlikely to use that space, so don't let the 500 MB space be too big a factor in your consideration when comparing with other web hosts. The hosting company is also aware of that, which is why they feel free to offer you that as a means of enticing you to host there. As a rough gauge a website that contains some mixed media and an average number of images, background files etc and is approximately a 150 web pages will use less than 5 MB for its pages and associated files. If You are considering using a lot of embedded video etc then more disk space storage would be useful, but even then it is unlikely you will need more than 50GB for the average site.

Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year around? Remeber your chosen host may be located ina different timezone than yourself. So if it's 3am their time when you are half way through updating your site but have encountered a problem, you still need to be able to access the support team. Also read the reviews and forums to make sure that their support staff are actually technically competent. You wouldn't want to sign up for a host that is run by a bunch of salesmen who only know how to sell and not fix problems.

If you are paying for a site, you really should make sure you have all of these. Don't worry if you don't yet understand some of the terms, as your knowledge and experience grows you soon will. 

Note that some commercial hosts do not allow you to install PHP or CGI scripts without their approval. This is not desirable since it means that you have to wait for them before you can implement a feature on your site. ".htaccess" is needed if you are to customise error pages (pages that display when, say, a user requests for a non-existent page on your site) or to protect your site in various ways (such as preventing bandwidth theft and hot linking, etc). Telnet or SSH access is useful for certain things, including testing CGI scripts, maintaining databases, etc. Cron jobs may be needed for programs that you need to be run periodically (eg once a day). Check to see if these facilities are provided.

Because you are planning on doing business through your website, you must make sure the host provides these facilities. These facilities normally involve a higher priced package or additional charges but not in the case of Hostmonster which, as previousely stated, is probably the best value for money of any webhost available today. The main thing is to check to see if they are available at all before you commit to the host. You will definitely need SSL if you plan to collect credit card information on your site.

You will need  email addresses at your own domain ( such as sales@yourdomain.com, etc) in order to administrate your business. The host should provide this with the package and allow you to have a catch-all email account that allows anyname@yourdomain.com to wind up being routed to you. You should be able to create an email address to automatically reply to the sender with a preset message (called an Autoresponder). Furthermore you should be able to retreive your email with your own email software (such as 'Outlook Express' or 'Thunderbird') via a Pop3 service and should also be able to set up mail forwarding to any chosen address outside of your domain.

This is called various names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and at the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account. Avoid hosts where you have to go through their technical support each time you want to change a password or add/delete an email account. Such chores are common maintenance chores that every webmaster performs time and time again, and it would be a great hassle if you had to wait for their technical support to make the changes for you.

For those who are thinking of selling web space or having multiple domains or subdomains hosted in your account, you should look to see if they provide this, and the amount extra that they charge for this (whether it is a one-time or monthly charge, etc).

Is the type of operating system and server important? Whether you think so or not on the theoretical level, there are a few practical reasons for looking out for the type of server.

In general, if you want to use things like ASP (PHP is better), you have no choice but to look for a Windows NT/2000/XP machine for your server.

However a better option is to sign up to the often cheaper, more stable and feature-laden Unix systems running the Apache server such as Hostmonster. In fact, if dynamically generated pages that can access databases (etc) is what you want, you can always use the more portable (and popular) PHP instead of tying yourself down to ASP. Another reason to prefer Unix-based web hosts (which include web hosts using systems like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc) using the Apache web server is that these servers allow you to configure a lot of facilities that you typically need on your site (error pages, protecting your images, blocking email harvesters, blocking IP addresses, etc) without having to ask your web host to implement them. 

This is something of a mute point actually. Most reputable hosting services remain extremely affordable and all come in around the same ball park figure of a few dollars per month. However, as ever, you should realise that you often get what you pay for and certainly the free hosts should be avoided. Nonetheless  it's not necessarily true that the most expensive hosts are the best. At the end of the day it really is all about how well your chosen host meets the criteria outlined here. 

Generally speaking you will be extremely hard pressed to beat Hostmonster for their outstanding service and reliability but , as always, shop around.

Most web hosts allow you to select an annual payment plan that gives you a cheaper rate than if you were to pay monthly. However paying monthly allows you to switch web hosts quickly should you encounter problems. 

Not all hosting companies own or lease their own web servers. Some of them are actually resellers for some other hosting company. The disadvantage of using a reseller is the possibility that you are dealing with people who don't know much about the system they are selling and who take longer to help you (they have to transmit your technical support request to the actual hosting company for it to be acted upon). However, this also depends on both the reseller and the underlying hosting company. It is thus wise not to rule out all resellers. There are a number of reliable and fast ones who are actually quite good and cheap. In fact, a number of resellers sell the same packages cheaper than their original hosting company. If you find out that a particular company is a reseller, you will need to investigate both the reseller and the real hosting company.