Website Hosting - so what do you get for your money?

Over the last 10 years, I've discovered a wide range of website hosting service providers and have had first hand experience with both the big and small players in the industry.

My freelance business is in web design and development, and so, one of the major components of any online business is of course, hosting for your website.

Now rather than moan about the poor service I've had from some companies (who deserve not to be named), I thought that perhaps my experience with website hosting would be informative to any new business owner looking to go out on their own, online.

The first step is to work out wether you're going brand name or open source, Windows or Linux - that itself is a topic for another lens, so for this, let's just concentrate on Windows hosting.

Perhaps the simplest way to understand the differences between various plans and what you get for your hosting dollars, would be to compare some of the hosting companies I trust to serve my websites and those of my clients.

Brinkster.com/www.brinkster.com/redirect.aspx?ad=9999&rf=vaughanj">Brinkster.com, who run a range of very good, very simple hosting solutions...

They split their offering into three sections to cater for most needs.

Rookie Hosting will give you 200Gb space to store your website and files, 2Tb (yes Terrabytes) of traffic, 50 email accounts, Classic ASP 3, FTP access and their free Website Builder. This plan is perfect for small sites that use an MS Access database.

- Get a free website (complete with referral banners if you want to make some easy referral commmissions)
- Every hosting package includes a free Website Builder, so you don't need to a) be an expert or b) employ an expert to build your site

Pro Hosting will give you an extra 150Gb space, a total of 350Gb, 3.5Tb traffic allowance, 500 email accounts ASP/.Net and PHP, a 250Mb MySQL database in addition to supporting good old MS Access too.

- 3.5Tb of traffic is very generous, and most small businesses would need a lot less than 500 mail boxes

Advanced Hosting again ups the ante with 500Gb of space, 6Tb traffic, 2000 email accounts each with 1Gb space, and of course full database facilties including a 250Mb SQL database, capable of handling any traffic spike.

- Not quite double the traffic, but still plenty for even the most popular of sites
- You get the big boy of database solutions, a 250Mb SQL database which can handle a massive number of requests per second (this means you don't have worry about your site melting should it get famous overnight)

Brinkster also offer a range of solutions for dedicated server hosting, including an offer to get double the hard drive space for free.

2GBhosting.com
Next up is 2GBhosting.com, who offer incredible value and advanced control for you web designer types. Their Windows plans come with an arsenal of features including

- 2Gb storage space
- 110 Email accounts
- Domain hosting for up to 11 domains (put your undeveloped domain names to work early, before you even develop the content),
- Chioce of PHP 4 or 5 !so you can still use those neat PHP scripts on your Windows hosting)
- Classic ASP, ASP .Net versions 1 through 3.5
- plus other features too, including a 10Gb plan with all this, but more
- Reseller hosting solutions include apps like Drupal, DotNetNuke, Joomla, Movable Type and more!

Their Windows hosting platform uses the Plesk Control Panel, and while it's better looking than intuitive, it might be too much control for novices. They also offer attractive solutions for Windows and Linux reseller hosting but you'll need to know a bit about managing a server - the support is good too, less than 24 hours on every ticket I've submitted, but you'll need to figure some things out yourself if you don't have a webmaster to do it for you.

If you really want the whole kit and kaboodle and your own control over it, I found it hard to pass up the 2GBhosting packages - packed full of great value. If you go for this option, you might want to keep a good web developer nearby.

LunarPages
The next host on my list is LunarPages - who offer everything from personal websites to dedicated servers and hosting for small business. For those wanting to resell hosting as part of your web services to clients, they also offer reseller hosting plans at very affordable prices, but my experience so far has been just with their basic hosting plan, which was ready in a matter of seconds after signing up.

Thoroughly recommended for online marketers looking to deploy an online venture quickly - along with the explosion in new .ws website domains being registered, makes now the best opportunity to corner your market or grow it big.

There are just two of the good, free Windows hosts that I can recommend, and the old adage of 'you get what you pay for' holds true for free website hosting plans.

Brinkster
First up, is Brinkster again, who are able to offer a free website hosting deal.

- The good: you get to use their simple admin interface, complete with a very good in-browser file browser for uploading and managing you website file.
- The bad: You'll have to agree to show somebody's ads.

ASPhost4free
Second up, is ASPhost4free who give you some space on their servers, and that's about it - literally, just some space you can access via FTP to run websites coded in ASP

- The good: Clean, fresh space, that means, nobody's ads!
- The bad: You don't get fruit for free.

Don't expect to get free email boxes, nor will you get database functionality, nor will you even get any support, other than FAQs on the website and what you can dig up on forums.

But that's what you get when you pay nothing, so bear that in mind if you are looking for free or cheap hosting.

More on this later in the week.