Tuesday, May 27, 2008

How to choose a web hosting service

It might look trivial to choose a internet service provider. Most of us may end up choosing a hosting server based on price and languages supported. This selection process might work well in case of simple personal web sites. In order to make the selection process easier I tried to list down the criteria. The criteria may not be complete, so please comment in case you have an interesting list.

1. Price plan
2. Disk space
3. Limits on Bandwidth transfer per day/month/year
4. Uptime of the hosting service
5. Support by phone/email
6. Technology support (HTML/DHTML/PHP/ASP/JSP/Servlet/Perl/CGI)
7. Database support (oracle/MS Access/My SQL)
8. FTP support for uploading and downloading web site files
9. Control Panel
10. Support for blogging/wiki/RSS/Atom feeds/forums)
11. Domain name registrations and aliases for domain names
12. email aliases
13. Contract timeline (is it easy to switch to another hosting provider if the current provider do not provide a consistent quality in the service.)
14. web mail
15. Power backup capacity of the hosting provider
16. 24/7 network monitoring
17. Web site statistics
18. Bandwidth and disk space monitoring