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If you intend to create a website for business purpose or if you are ready to allot a bit of budget for your personal website, instead of opting for the various free options of online presence, then you should go for paid web hosts.

There are several different kinds of packages and options given by different web host service providers. There are so many, that it can be quite a daunting task for you to choose among them.

You can decide based on the following options.

• Technology
• Reliability
• Cost

Let us look at each of these option categories,.

Techonology

These web host providers would be hosting your websites on servers.  The servers usually run on a UNIX/Linux or Windows as the operating system.  If you want to develop your website with ASP and .NET technologies, then you should go for Windows Servers – other wise, in my opinion, choose a web host service provider whose server runs on Linux.

And speaking of servers, you can opt for a shared space server or a dedicated server.  The shared space server is when your website is small and would not need to handle a lot of traffic.  In that case, there is no requirement for one monster of a server to be running for the puny site – there can be many sites running on the same server.  The web host service provider places websites from different clients choosing this plan, on the same server.  On the other hand, large websites with humongous traffic (imagine Amazon, eBay, Goolge, Yahoo), may require a server dedicated to it.  In some cases, it may require more than one server dedicated to the website running as a cluster.

Reliability

As I said earlier – there are many who provide web host service.  The cost of setting up a server and selling the space is high, but it is not prohibitive.  There are even people who buy, what are called reseller accounts from large web host service providers, and break the package into chunks.  And then – you guessed it right – sell those smaller packages as shared web host.  There is nothing wrong in doing so, because the larger web host service provider do not have time and money to spend dealing with smaller website owners.  But all this has resulted in less reliable service in many cases.  Either the reseller gets greedy and over sells the server space, or sometimes they just shut their shop and their mail boxes.  Some servers are poorly maintained and their uptime falls below what they would have promised.

So when you choose a web host, choose wisely and ask around people.  Approach some one you know who is running websites for a couple of years.  Read around the internet – but again, be careful in judging what your read.  It is easy to fabricate things in the internet.

Cost

Like with almost everything else in life, you get what you paid for. The above to factors decide upon the cost of the package.  And you will have to do trade offs between what you get and how much you are willing to spend.  A dedicated server will cost more than shared web hosts.  A web host provider, who is present in the industry for long may charge more than a new one.

When deciding the budget for web host, take the previously mentioned factors into consideration and also, know what you expect out of your website.  If it is a personal website, it is not really necessary to go for a dedicated server – you can go for a shared server.  If it is a business website, may be you could start off with a shared plan, and depending on your revenue model, or how much revenue you have generated, and how much of it you want to divert to web host, you can scale it up to dedicated server or even a cluster of servers.

Now that we have all the options laid out in front of us for personal and business websites - free and paid, we can look at the different options to build the webpages in the next post in this series.